citizens, or haggling with persistent blanketed braves over canoe-loads
of ill-smelling pelts which they brought down from the green forests of
the north. Monsieur Vigo's clothes were the color of the tobacco he gave
in exchange; his eyes were not unlike the black beads he traded, but
shrewd and kindly withal, set in a square saffron face that had the
contradiction of a small chin. As the days wore into months, Monsieur
Vigo's place very naturally became the headquarters for our army, if army
it might be called. Of a morning a dozen would be sitting against the
logs in the black shadow, and in the midst of them always squatted an
unsavory Indian squaw. A few braves usually stood like statues at the
corner, and in front of the door another group of hunting shirts.
Without was the paper money of the Continental Congress, within the good
tafia and tobacco of Monsieur Vigo. One day Monsieur Vigo's young Creole
clerk stood shrugging his shoulders in the doorway. I stopped.

"By tam!" Swein Poulsson was crying to the clerk, as he waved a worthless
scrip above his head. "Vat is money?"

This definition the clerk, not being a Doctor Johnson, was unable to give
offhand.

"Vat are you, choost? Is it America?" demanded Poulsson, while the
others looked on, some laughing, some serious. "And vich citizen are you
since you are ours? You vill please to give me one carrot of tobacco."
And he thrust the scrip under the clerk's nose.

The clerk stared at the uneven lettering on the scrip with disdain.

"Money," he exclaimed scornfully, "she is not money. Piastre--Spanish
dollare--then I give you carrot."