t there. But
it is true as gospel. The owner of this store had many others scattered
about in this foreign country: at Vincennes, at St. Louis, where he
resided, at Cahokia. He knew Michilimackinac and Quebec and New Orleans.
He had been born some thirty-one years before in Sardinia, had served
in the Spanish army, and was still a Spanish subject. The name of this
famous gentleman was Monsieur Francois Vigo, and he was the Rothschild
of the country north of the Ohio. Monsieur Vigo, though he merited it,
I had not room to mention in the last chapter. Clark had routed him from
his bed on the morning of our arrival, and whether or not he had been in
the secret of frightening the inhabitants into making their wills, and
then throwing them into transports of joy, I know not.

Monsieur Vigo's store was the village club. It had neither glass in the
window nor an attractive display of goods; it was merely a log cabin set
down on a weedy, sun-baked plot. The stuffy smell of skins and furs came
out of the doorway. Within, when he was in Kaskaskia, Monsieur Vigo was
wont to sit behind his rough walnut table, writing with a fine quill,
or dispensing the news of the villages to the priest and other prominent
citizens, or haggling with persistent blanketed braves over canoe-loads
of ill-smelling pelts which they brought down from the green forests of
the north. Monsieur Vigo's clothes were the color of the tobacco he gave
in exchange; his eyes were not unlike the black beads he traded, but
shrewd and kindly withal, set in a square saffron face that had the
contradiction of a small chin. As the days wore into months, Monsieur
Vigo's place very naturally became the headquarters for our army, if
army it might be called. Of a morning a dozen would be sitting against
the logs in the black shadow, and in the midst of them always squatted
an unsavory Indian squaw. A few braves usually stood like statues at
the corner, and in front of the door another group of hunting shirts.
Without was the paper money of the Continental Congress, within the good
tafia and tobacco of Monsieur Vigo. One day Monsieur Vigo's young Creole
clerk stood shrugging his shoulders in the doorway. I stopped.

"By tam!" Swein Poulsson was crying to the clerk, as he waved a
worthless scrip above his head. "Vat is money?"

This definition the clerk, not being a Doctor Johnson, was unable to
give offhand.

"Vat are you, choost? Is it America?" demanded Poulsson, while t