Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 by Jennifer Blake Page B

greatest ally.
    “Say, half-breed,” Pascal called after a time, “what’s your brother the Great Sun going to think when he finds out you took off in the middle of their little party?”
    “It will not be unusual.” The answer was calm, without a trace of apprehension.
    “What about when he hears that you showed up at Fort Saint Jean Baptiste with us? That ought to make you a traitor, the way I see it.”
    “I owe allegiance to none.”
    Elise heard the firmness of the words, but she could not help remembering that Reynaud had sought to warn Chepart and the French.
    Pascal laughed. “Let’s hope the Great Sun sees it that way. The way I understand it, your people have no more liking for a turncoat than anybody else.”
    “I have no people,” Reynaud said.
    His words echoed in Elise’s mind long after the two men ceased to speak. They had been without consciousness or self-pity and yet they touched some fragile cord of response in her. They made Reynaud Chavalier seem less forbidding somehow. Everyone had people. The half-breed’s misfortune was that he did not know which were his, the Natchez or the French.
    The hours passed. They walked for league upon league, stumbling along with eyes grown accustomed to the darkness and a slowly developing instinct for avoiding the whip of released branches or the dangle of brier vines. They stopped to rest when Madame Doucet sank, groaning, to the ground, but were up again and moving as soon as she was able. Toward dawn, they made a cold camp to slake their thirst and take a bite of food, then sank down to sleep for a few short hours. By the time the sun rose they were moving again.
    The day was fine, even a little warm, for the exercise of hard walking. The autumn had been a long one. They had had one or two light frosts, but the days had continued pleasant; cool enough for a fire at night, requiring nothing more than light sleeves during the day. As the hours slipped by, they fell into a routine, learning to place one foot in front of the other without thought. Madame Doucet complained of blisters, sagging under her load until Reynaud relieved her of it and thrust it upon a disgruntled Pascal. Elise, tired of the constant fight to keep her skirts from under her feet, asked Reynaud for a thong, which she tied around her waist and then pulled the hem of her skirts up through it in the front in imitation of the washerwomen of Paris. She was tempted to catch the back hem of her habit skirt and draw it up between her legs, also tucking it in, as was sometimes done, but decided that the bulk of the heavy velvet habit and petticoat she wore under it would make for uncomfortable walking. After sleeping in it on the ground, snatching a hundred small tears in the fabric on briers, and soaking it in the many small streams they were forced to cross, dragging it in the mud hardly mattered.
    The air grew warmer as the day advanced. The country they were traveling in was low and swampy with a high canopy of enormous cypress, oak, and maple trees; hickory, sweet gum, ash, bay, dogwood, and a dozen others, all hung with the swaying gray moss the French had named Capuchin’s beard. Creeks and branches wound through it in such snakelike curves that they forded the same streams again and again. As perspiration gathered under Elise’s hair, trickling down her neck and between her breasts, she came to look forward to wading in the cool water, despite the necessity of pulling her knit stockings and half boots on and off and getting the black alluvial mud between her toes. She considered doing as Pascal and St. Amant did, tramping through the water with her shoes on, but she was afraid that walking in the wet footwear afterward would make the blisters rise quickly on her tender feet. The most bothersome thing was the mosquitoes that hovered in the air under the tall trees of the forest swampland. They were black and vicious, with a keening whine that grated on the nerves like a high-pitched