But our good Seigneur will never grow fat, monsieur; he is of the poor to whom shall belong the Kingdom of God." John did not clearly understand this, being unacquainted with the official system of peculation by false vouchers--a system under which the command of a backwoods fort was reckoned to be worth a small fortune. His mind recurred to Dominique and to the Commandant's uneasiness at Dominique's mention of business. "A queer fellow, that Dominique!" he muttered, half to himself; "and a queer fate that made him the brother of Bateese." The priest heard, as deaf men sometimes will hear a word or two spoken below ordinary pitch. "Ah!" said he, shaking his head. "You have heard of Bateese? A sad case--a very sad case!" "There was an accident, I have heard." Father Joly glanced at John's face and, reading the question, bent his own dim eyes on the river. John divined at once that the old man knew more than he felt inclined to tell. "It was at Bord-a-Loup, a little above Boisveyrac, four years ago last St. Peter's tide. The two brothers were driving some timber which the Seigneur had cleared there; the logs had jammed around a rock not far from shore and almost at the foot of the fall. The two had managed to get across and were working the mass loose with handspikes when, just as it began to break up, Bateese slipped and fell between two logs." "Through some careless push of Dominique's, was it not?" But Father Joly did not hear, or did not seem to. "He was hideously broken, poor Bateese. For weeks it did not seem possible that he could live. The _habitants_ find Dominique a queer fellow, even as you do; and I have observed that even Mademoiselle Diane treats him somewhat impatiently. But in truth he is a lad grown old before his time. It is terrible when such a blow falls upon the young. He and Bateese adored one another." And this was all John learned at the time. But three days later he heard more of the story, and from Mademoiselle Diane. She was seated in an embrasure of the terrace--the same, in fact, in which she had taken measurements for John's new tunic. She was embroidering it now with the Bearnais badge, and had spread Barboux's tunic on the gun-breach to give her the pattern. John, passing along the terrace in a brown study, while his eyes followed the evolutions of Sergeant Bedard's men at morning parade in the square below, did not catch sight of her until she called to him to come and admire her handiwork. "Monsieur is _distrait_, it appears," she said, mischievously. "It must be weary work for him, whiling away the hours in this contemptible fortress?" "I do not find Fort Amitie contemptible, mademoiselle." She shook her head and laughed. "If you wish to please me, monsieur, you must find some warmer praise for it. For in some sort it is my ancestral home, and I love every stone of it."