anent.

THE NAIN ROUGE

Among all the impish offspring of the Stone God, wizards and witches,
that made Detroit feared by the early settlers, none were more dreaded
than the Nain Rouge (Red Dwarf), or Demon of the Strait, for it appeared
only when there was to be trouble. In that it delighted. It was a
shambling, red-faced creature, with a cold, glittering eye and teeth
protruding from a grinning mouth. Cadillac, founder of Detroit, having
struck at it, presently lost his seigniory and his fortunes. It was seen
scampering along the shore on the night before the attack on Bloody Run,
when the brook that afterward bore this name turned red with the blood of
soldiers. People saw it in the smoky streets when the city was burned in
1805, and on the morning of Hull's surrender it was found grinning in the
fog. It rubbed its bony knuckles expectantly when David Fisher paddled
across the strait to see his love, Soulange Gaudet, in the only boat he
could find--a wheel-barrow, namely--but was sobered when David made a
safe landing.

It chuckled when the youthful bloods set off on Christmas day to race the
frozen strait for the hand of buffer Beauvais's daughter Claire, but when
her lover's horse, a wiry Indian nag, came pacing in it fled before their
happiness. It was twice seen on the roof of the stable where that
sour-faced, evil-eyed old mumbler, Jean Beaugrand, kept his horse, Sans
Souci--a beast that, spite of its hundred years or more, could and did
leap every wall in Detroit, even the twelve-foot stockade of the fort, to
steal corn and watermelons, and that had been seen in the same barn,
sitting at a table, playing seven-up with his master, and drinking a
liquor that looked like melted brass. The dwarf whispered at the sleeping
ear of the old chief who slew Friar Constantine, chaplain of the fort, in
anger at the teachings that had parted a white lover from his daughter
and led her to drown herself--a killing that the red man afterward
confessed, because he could no longer endure the tolling of a mass bell
in his ears and the friar's voice in the wind.

The Nain Rouge it was who claimed half of the old mill, on Presque Isle,
that the sick and irritable Josette swore that she would leave to the
devil when her brother Jean pestered her to make her will in his favor,
giving him complete ownership. On the night of her death the mill was
wrecked by a thunder-bolt, and a red-faced imp was often seen among the
ruins, t