ciousness of what it would like to do.
So content was I, that I was annoyed to see La Mothe-Cadillac approach.

Yet Cadillac was important to me then. He was commandant at
Michillimackinac,--the year was 1695,--and so was in control of the
strategic point of western New France. The significance of all that he
stood for, and all that he might accomplish, filled my thought as he
swaggered toward me now, and I said to myself, somewhat complacently,
that, with all his air of importance, I had a fuller conception than he
of what lay in his palm.

He hailed me without preface. "Where do you find food for your
laughter in this forsaken country, Montlivet? I have watched you
swagger up and down with a smile on your face for the last hour. What
is the jest?"

In truth, there was no jest in me by the time he finished. My own
thought had just called him a swaggerer, and now he clapped the same
phrase back at me.

"There are more swaggerers upon this beach than I," I cried hotly, and
I felt my blood rise.

My tone was more insulting than my words, and Cadillac, too, grew red.
I saw the veins upon his neck begin to swell, and all my childish
irritation vanished.

"Come, monsieur," I hastened; "I was wrong. But I meant no harm, and
surely here is a jest fit for your laughter, that two grown men should
stand and swell at each other like turkeycocks, all because they are
drunk with the air of a May day. Come, here is my hand."

"But you said that I"--

"And what if I did?" I interrupted. I had fallen into step, and was
pacing by his side. "What is there in the term that we should hold it
in slight esteem? I swagger. What does that mean, after all, but my
acknowledgment of the presence of Dame Opportunity, and my admission
that I would like to impress her; to draw her eye in my direction.
Surely that is laudable, monsieur."

Cadillac laughed. His tempers were the ruffle of a passing breeze upon
deep water. "So you think that I swagger to meet opportunity? Well,
if I do, I get but little out of it. Sometimes I push myself near
enough to pluck at the sleeve of the dame; oftener she passes me by."

"Yet she gave you this key to an empire," I suggested. I had been
rude, and I repented it, and more than that, there was something in the
man that tempted me to offer him flattery even as I desire to give
sweets to an engaging child.

But this cajolery he swept away with a fling of his heavy arm. "The
key to an e