Part 6

He opened his eyes and saw the creek they were slipping past, and a pleasant knoll beside it, and whispered:--

"There is the place of my burial."

"But, Father," pleaded Pierre, "it is yet early in the day. We can take you farther."

"Carry me ashore here," he whispered again.

So they entered the creek and took him ashore, building a fire and sheltering him as well as they could. There a few hours afterward he died, the weeping men holding up his cross before him, while he thanked the Divine Majesty for letting him die a poor missionary. When he could no longer speak, they repeated aloud the prayers he had taught them.

They left him buried on that shore with a large cross standing over his grave. Later his Indians removed his bones to the Mission of St. Ignace, with a procession of canoes and a priest intoning. They were placed under the altar of his own chapel. If you go to St. Ignace, you may see a monument now on that spot, and people have believed they traced the foundation of the old bark chapel. But the spot where he first lay was long venerated.

A great fur trader and pioneer named Gurdon Hubbard made this record about the place, which he visited in 1818:--

"We reached Marquette River, about where the town of Ludington now stands on the Michigan shore. This was where Father Marquette died, about one hundred and forty years before, and we saw the remains of a red-cedar cross, erected by his men at the time of his death to mark his grave; and though his remains had been removed to the Mission, at Point St. Ignace, the cross was held sacred by the voyageurs, who, in passing, paid reverence to it, by kneeling and making the sign of the cross. It was about three feet above the ground, and in a falling condition. We reset it, leaving it out of the ground about two feet, and as I never saw it after, I doubt not that it was covered by the drifting sands of the following winter, and that no white man ever saw it afterwards."

III.

THE MAN WITH THE COPPER HAND.

One day at the end of August, when Marquette's bones had lain under his chapel altar nearly two years and a half, the first ship ever seen upon the lakes was sighted off St. Ignace. Hurons and Ottawas, French traders, and coureurs de bois, or wood-rangers, ran out to see the huge winged creature scudding betwixt Michilimackinac Island and Round Island. She was of about forty-five tons' burden. Five cannon showed through her port-holes, and as she came nearer, a carved dragon was seen to be her figurehead; she displayed the name Griffin and bore the white flag of France. The priest himself felt obliged to receive her company, for three Récollet friars, in the gray robe of St. Francis, appeared on the deck. But two men, one in a mantle of scarlet and gold, and the other in white and gold French uniform, were most watched by all eyes.

The ship fired a salute, and the Indians howled with terror and started to run; then turned back to see her drop her sails and her anchor, and come up in that deep crescent-shaped bay. She had weathered a hard storm in Lake Huron; but the men who handled her ropes were of little interest to coureurs de bois on shore, who watched her masters coming to land.

"It is the Sieur de la Salle in the scarlet mantle," one coureur de bois said to another. "And this is the ship he hath been building at Niagara. First one hears that creditors have seized his fort of Frontenac, and then one beholds him sailing here in state, as though naught on earth could daunt him."

"I would like service with him," said the other coureur de bois.

His companion laughed.

"Service with La Salle means the hardest marching and heaviest labor a voyageur ever undertook. I have heard he is himself tough as iron. But men hereabouts who have been in his service will take to the woods when they hear he has arrived; traders that he sent ahead with goods. If he gets his hand on them after he finds they have squandered his property, it will go hard with them."

"He has a long gray-colored face above his broad shoulders. I have heard of this Sieur Robert Cavelier de la Salle ever since he came to the province more than ten years ago, but I never saw him before. Is it true that Count Frontenac is greatly bound to him?"

"So true that Sieur de la Salle thereby got favor at court. It was at court that a prince recommended to him yon swart Italian in white and gold that he brought with him on his last voyage from France. Now, there is a man known already throughout the colony by reason of his hand."

"Which hand?"

"The right one."

"I see naught ailing that. He wears long gauntlets pulled well over both wrists."

"His left hand is on his sword hilt. Doth he not hold the right a little stiffly?"

"It is true. The fingers are not bent."

"They never will be bent. It is a hand of copper."

"How can a man with a copper hand be of service in the wilderness?"

The first ranger shrugged. "That I know not. But having been maimed in European wars and fitted with a copper hand, he was yet recommended to Sieur de la Salle."

"But why hath an Italian the uniform of France?"

"He is a French officer, having been exiled with his father from his own country."