Indianapolis Times, Volume 35, Number 246, Indianapolis, Marion County, 22 February 1923 — Page 8

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Alice of Old Vincennes By Maurice Thompson THIRD NOVEL IN THE TIMES SERIES' BY INDIANA WRITERS COPYRIGHT, 190 8, BY ALICE LEE THOMPSON

some education, who had brought with him to the wilderness a bundle of books and a taste for reading. From faded letters and dimly remembered talk of those who once clung fondly to the legends and traditions of old Vincennes, it -is drawn that the Roussillon cherry tree stood not very far away from the present site of the Catholic church, on a slight swell of ground overlooking a wide marshly flat and the silver current of the Wabash. If the tree grew there, then there too stood the Roussillon house with its cosy log rooms, its clay-daubed chimneys and its grape-vine-mantled verandas, while some distance away and nearer the river the rude fort with its huddled officers' quarters seemed to fling out over the wild landscape, through its squinting and lopsided port-holes, a gaze of stubborn defiance. Not far off was the little log church, where one good Father Beret, or as named by the Indians, who aU loved him. Father Blackrobe, performed the services of his sacred calling; and scattered all around were the cabins of traders, soldiers and woodsmen forming a queer little town, the like of which cannot now be seen anywhere on the earth. It is not known just when Vincennes was first founded; but most historians make the probable date very early in the eighteenth century, somewhere between 1710 and 1730. In 1810 the Roussillon cherry tree was thought by a distinguished botanical letterwriter to be at least fifty years old. which would make the date of its planting about 1760. Certainly as shown by the time-stained family records upon which this story of ours is based, it was a flourishing and widetopped tree in early summer of 1778, its branches loaded to drooping with luscious fruit. So low did the dark ltd clusters hang at one point that a tall young girl standing on the ground easily reached the best ones and made her lips purple with their juice while she ate them.

That was long ago, measured by what has come to pass on the gentle swell of rich country from which Vincennes overlooks the Wabash. The new town flourishes notably and its appearance marks the latest limit of progress. Electric cars in its streets, electric lights in its beautiful homes, the roar of railway trains coming and going In all directions, bicycles whirling hither and thither, the most fashionable styles of equipages, from brougham to pony-phaeton, make tne days of flint-lock guns and buckskin irousers seem ages down the past; ind yet we are looking back over but a little more than a hundred urd twenty years to see Alice Roussillon standing under the cherry tree and holding high a tempting cluster of fruit, while a very short, hump-backed youth looks up with longing eves and vainly reaches for it. The tabic-a.i is not merely rustic, it is primitive. '•Jump!" the girl is saying m French, "jump. Jean; jump high!” Yes. that was very long ago. in the days when women lightly braved what the strongest men would shrink from now. Alice Roussillon was tall, lithe, strongly knit, with an almost perfect figure, judging by what the master sculptors carved for the form of Venus, and her face was comely and winning, if not alisglutely beautiful: but the time and the place were vigorously indicated by her dress, which was of coarse stuff and simply :* • signed. Plainly she was a child of the American wilderness, a daughter of old Vincennes on the Wabash in the time that tried men's souls. "Jump. Jean!” she cried, her face laughing with a shew of cheek-dun pies, an arching of finely sketched brows and the twinkling of large blue gray eyes. "Jump high and get them!'’ While she waved her sun-browned hand holding the cherries aloft, the breeze blowing fresh from the southwest tossed her hair so that some loose strands shone like rimpled flames. The sturdy little hunchback did leap with surprising activity; but the

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treacherous brown hand went higher, so high that the combined altitude of his jump and the reach of his unnaturally long arms was overcome. Again and again he sprang vainly into the air comically, like a long-legged, squat bodied frog. "And you brag of your agility and strength, Jean,” she laughingly remarked; “but you can’t take cherries when they are offered to you. What a clumsy bungler you are." “I can climb and get some,” he said' with a hideously happy grin, and im mediately embraced the bole of the tree, up wfiich he began scrambling almost as fast as a squirrel. When he had mounted high enough to be extending a hand for a hold on a crotch, Alice grasped his leg near the foot and pulled him down, despite his clinging and struggling, until his hands clawed in the soft earth at the tree's root, while she held his captive leg almost vertically erect. It was a show’ of great strength; but Alice looked quite unconscious of it, laughing merrily, the dimples deepening in her plump cheeks, her forearm, now bared to the elbow, gleam ing white and shapely while its muscles rippled on account of the jerking and kicking of Jean. All the time she was holding the cherries high In her other hand, shaking them by the twig to which their slender stems attached them, and saying in a sweetly tantalizing tone: "What makes you climb downward after cherries, Jean? What a foolish fellow you are, indeed, trying to grabble cherries out of the ground, as you do potatoes! I'm sure I didn't suppose that you knew so little as that.” Her French was colloquial, but quite good, showing heri and there what we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated in isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we call the world; something that may be described as a bookish cast appearing oddly in the midst of phrasing distinctly rustic and local —a peculiarity not easy to transfer from one language to another.

Jean the hunchback was a muscular little deformity and a wonder of good nature. His head looked unnaturally large, nestling grotesquely between the points of his lifted and distorted shoulders, like a shaggy black animal in the fork of a broken tree. He was bellicose in his amiable way and never knew just when to acknowledge defeat. How long hemight have kept up the hopeless struggle with the girl's invincible grip would be hard to guess. His release was caused by the approach of a third person, who wore the robe of a Catholic priest and the countenance of a man who had lived and suffered a long time without much loss of physical strength and endurance. This was Peter Beret, grizzly, short, compact, his face deeply lined, his month decidedly aslant on acccunt of some lost teeth, and his eyes set deep under gray, shaggy brows. Looking at him when his features were in repose a first impression might not have been favorable; but seeing him smile or hearing him speak changed everything. His voice was sweetness itself and his smile won you on the instant. Something like a pervading sorrow always seemed to be close behind his eyes and under his speech; yet he was a genial, sometimes almost jolly, man. very prone to join in the lighter amusements o fhls people. "Children, children, my children,” he called out as he approached along a little pathway leading up from the direction of the church, “what are you doing now? Bah there, Alice, will you pull Jean's leg off?" At first they did not hear him, they were so nearly deafened by their own vocal discords. ' Why are you standing on your head with your feet so high in air. Jean?” he added. "It’s not a polite attitude in the presence of a young lady. Are you a pig. that you pok your nose in the dirt?” Alice now turned her bright head and gave I’ere Beret a look of frank welcome, which at the same time shot a beam of willful self-assertion. My daughter, are you trying to help Jean up the tree feet foremost?" the priest added, standing where he had halted Just outside of the straggling yard fence.

He had his hands on his hips and was quietly chuckling at the scene i> tore him as one who, although old, sympathized with the natural and harmless sportiveness of young people and would as lief as not join in a prank or two. “You see what I'm doing, Father Beret,” said Alice. “I am preventing a great damage to you. You will may be lose a good many cherry pies and dumplings if I let Jean go. He was climbing the tree to pilfer the fruit so I pulled him down, you under stand.” "Ta, ta!” exclaimed the good man, shaking his gray head; “we must reason with the child. Let go his leg, laughter, I will vouch for him; eh, Jean?” Alice released the hunchback, then laughed gayly and tossed the cluster of cherries into his hand, whereupon he began munching them voraciously and talking at the same time. “I knew I coukl get them," he boasted; “and see, I have them now." He hopped around, looking like a species of ill-formed monkey. Pere Beret came and leaned on the low fence close to Alice. She war. almost as tall as he. “The sun scorches today,” he said, beginning to mop his furrowed face with a red-flowered cotton handker chief; “and from the look of the sky yonder,” pointing southward, “it is going to bring on a storm. How is Madame Roussillon today?” “She is complaining as she usually does when she feels extremely well,” said Alice; “that’s why 1 to take her place at the oven and bake pies. 1 got hot and came out to catch a bit of this breeze. Oh, but you needn’t smile and look greedy, Pere Beret, the pies are not for your teeth!” “My daughter, I am not a glutton, 1 hope; I had meat not two hours since—some broiled young squirrels with cress, sent me by Rene de Ron-

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ville. He never forgets his old father." "Oh, I never forget you either, mon pere; I thought of you today every time I spread a crust and filled it with cherries; and when I took out a pie all broVn and hot, the red juice bubblingeout of it so good smelling and tempting, do you know what 1 said to mj^lf?” “How coi.Vjknow, my child?”

OUT OUR WAY—By WILLIAMS

TILE OJA) HOME TOWN—By STANLEY

“Well, I thought this: ‘Not a single bite of that pie does Father Beret get.' ” “Why so, daughter?” “Because you said it was bad of me to read novels and told Mother Roussillon to hide them from me. I’ve had any amount of trouble about it.” “Ta, ta! read the good books that I gave you. They will soon kill the

THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES

taste for these silly romances.” “I tried,” said Alice; “I tried very hard, and it's no use; your books are dull and stupidly heavy. What do I care about something that a queer lot of saints did hundreds of years ago in times of plague and famine? Saints must have been poky people, and it is poky people who care to read about them, I think. I like reading about brave, heroic men and beautiful

An Unexpected Bath

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women, and wax and 'love.” Pere Beret looked away with a curious expression in his face, his eyes half closed. “And I’ll tell you now, Father Beret.” Alice went on after a pause, “no more claret and pies do you get until I can have my own sort of books back again to read as I please.” She stamped her moccasinshod foot with decided energy.

FRECKLES AND lIIS FRIENDS—By BLOSSER,

OUR BOARDING HOUSE—By AHERN

The good priest broke into a hearty laugh, and taking off his cap of grassstraw mechanically scratched his bald head. He looked at the tall, strong girl before him for a moment or two, and it would have been hard for the best physiognomist to decide just how much of approval and how much of disapproval that look really slgni led. Although, as Father Beret had said.

THURSDAY, i?EB. 22, IV2o

—By ALLMAN

—By AL POSEN

the sun’s heat was violent, causing that gentle soul to pass his bundled handkerchief with a wiping circular motion over his bald and bedewed pate, the wind was momently freshening, while up from behind the trees on the horizon beyond the river, a cloud was rising blue-black, tumbled, and grim against the sky. (To Bo Continued.)