French songs that
were brought to his father's country by the adventurers who crossed the
seas with Jacques Cartier.

The bourgeois, who was aloft on the bastion sweeping the distance with
a field glass, suddenly threw an announcement down on the courtyard:

"Red Feather's village is coming and an emigrant train."

The space between the four walls immediately seethed into a whirlpool
of excitement. It eddied there for a moment, then poured through the
gateway into the long drainlike entrance passage and spread over the
grass outside.

Down the face of the opposite hill, separated from the fort by a narrow
river, came the Indian village, streaming forward in a broken torrent.
Over its barbaric brightness, beads and glass caught the sun, and the
nervous fluttering of eagle feathers that fringed the upheld lances
played above its shifting pattern of brown and scarlet. It descended
the slope in a broken rush, spreading out fanwise, scattered,
disorderly, horse and foot together. On the river bank it paused, the
web of color thickening, then rolled over the edge and plunged in. The
current, beaten into sudden whiteness, eddied round the legs of horses,
the throats of swimming dogs, and pressed up to the edges of the
travaux where frightened children sat among litters of puppies. Ponies
bestrode by naked boys struck up showers of spray, squaws with lifted
blankets waded stolidly in, mounted warriors, feathers quivering in
their inky hair, indifferently splashing them. Here a dog, caught by
the current, was seized by a sinewy hand; there a horse, struggling
under the weight of a travaux packed with puppies and old women, was
grasped by a lusty brave and dragged to shore. The water round them
frothing into silvery turmoil, the air above rent with their cries,
they climbed the bank and made for the camping ground near the fort.

Among the first came a young squaw. Her white doeskin dress was as
clean as snow, barbarically splendid with cut fringes and work of bead
and porcupine quills. Her mien was sedate, and she swayed to her horse
lightly and flexibly as a boy, holding aloft a lance edged with a
flutter of feathers, and bearing a round shield of painted skins.
Beside her rode the old chief, his blanket falling away from his
withered body, his face expressionless and graven deep with wrinkles.

"That's Red Feather and his favorite squaw," said the voice of Courant
at Susan's elbow.

She made no answer, staring