rows from
picking yet more bones than these which will embarrass you in your
hoeing, Jean Breboeuf."

"He says the Richelieu, Du Mesne," broke in John Law, musingly. "Very
far away it sounds. I wonder if we shall ever see it again, with its
little narrow farms. But here we have our own trails and our own lands,
and let us hope that Monsieur Jean shall prosper in his belated farming.
And now, for the rest of us, we must look presently to the building of
our houses."

Thus began, slowly and in primitive fashion, the building of one of the
first cities of the vast valley of the Messasebe; the seeds of
civilization taking hold upon the ground of barbarism, the one
supplanting the other, yet availing itself of that other. As the white
men took over the crude fields of the departed savages, so also they
appropriated the imperfect edifice which the conquerors of those savages
had left for them. It was in little the story of old England herself,
builded upon the races and the ruins of Briton, and Koman, and Saxon, of
Dane and Norman.

Under the direction of Law, the walls of the old war house were
strengthened with an inner row of palisades, supporting an embankment of
earth and stone. The overlap of the gate was extended into a re-entrant
angle, and rude battlements were erected at the four corners of the
inclosure. The little stream of unfailing water was led through a corner
of the fortress. In the center of the inclosure they built the houses; a
cabin for Law, one for the men, and a larger one to serve as store room
and as trading place, should there be opportunity for trade.

It was in these rude quarters that Law and his companion established
that which was the nearest approach to a home that either for the time
might claim; and it was thus that both undertook once more that old and
bootless human experiment of seeking to escape from one's own self.
Silent now, and dutifully obedient enough was this erstwhile English
beauty, Mary Connynge; yet often and often Law caught the question of
her gaze. And often enough, too, he found his own questioning running
back up the water trails, and down the lakes and across the wide ocean,
in a demand which, fiercer and fiercer as it grew, he yet remained too
bitter and too proud to put to the proof by any means now within his
power. Strange enough, savage enough, hopeless enough, was this wild
home of his in the wilderness of the Messasebe.

The smoke of the new settlement rose s