ompt, who
had been brought home with the terrified bridesmaids and laughed in
her sleeve all day because she thought Gabriel and his men were the
Puants, leaned against a wall and turned sick. I have heard her say
she never was so confused in her life as when she saw the driven
horses, and the firearms, and those coarse-haired scalps hanging to Le
Maudit Pensonneau's belt. The moon showed them all distinctly. Manette
had thought it laughable when she heard that Alexis Barbeau was shut
up in his brick house at Prairie du Pont, with all the men and guns
he could muster to protect his property; but now she wept indignantly
about it.

The priest had been the first man in the street, having lain down in
all his clothes except his cassock, and he heartily gave Celeste
and the young men his blessing, and counseled everybody to go to bed
again. But Celeste reminded them that she was hungry, and as for the
rescuers, they had ridden hard all day without a mouthful to eat. So
the whole town made a feast, everybody bringing the best he had to
Barbeau's house. They spread the table and crowded around, leaning
over each, other's shoulders to take up bits in their hands and eat
with and talk to the young people. Gabriel's mother sat beside him
with her arm around him, and opposite was Celeste with her grandfather
and grandmother, and all the party were ranged around. The feathers
had been blown out of their hair by that long chase, but their
buckskins were soiled, and the hastily washed colors yet smeared their
ears and necks. Yet this supper was quite like a bridal feast. Ah,
my child, we never know it when we are standing in the end of the
rainbow. Gabriel and Celeste might live a hundred years, but they
could never be quite as happy again.

Paul and Jacques Le Page sat down with the other young men, and the
noise of tongues in Barbeau's house could be heard out by the rigole.
It was like the swarming of wild bees. Paul and Jacques had waited
with the boat until nightfall. They heard the firing when the Puants
took Celeste, and watched hour after hour for some one to appear from
the path; but at last concluding that Gabriel had been obliged to
change his plan, they rowed back to Caho'.

Claudis Beauvois was the only person who did not sit up talking until
dawn. And nobody thought about him until noon the next day, when
Captain Jean Saucier with a company of fusileers rode into the village
from Fort Chartres.

That was the firs