His rough woolen suit, leather-lined, hung loosely on him,
but he wore it with a jauntiness that matched the bravado of his song.
Cadillac came forward in welcome. He was always an orator that the
Indians themselves envied, and now his rhetoric was as unhampered as
though he thought that the prisoner was following each flowing
syllable. As he unbound the stiffened arms--they were pitifully thin
and small, I thought--he called all mythology to witness his deep
regret that this indignity should have been offered to his brother of
the white race. I followed him and listened, storing away metaphors
even as I carried beads in my cargo. I should need all the eloquence
at my command before the close of the summer, and my own tongue was
always too direct of speech.
Cadillac felt me at his elbow, and when he saw my listening face he
stopped to give me a slow wink. "Will monsieur turn pupil to learn
swaggering?" he asked, with an upward cock of the eye. "I had thought
him too old for a school."
I bowed, and hated myself for my lagging wits that would not furnish a
retort. "Never too old to sit at your feet," I assured him, and I went
away knowing that I had been slow, and that the honors were with him,
but knowing, also, that somehow I liked the man, and that I should
drink his health when I opened my next tierce of canary.
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