THE VOYAGEUR _The French Who Followed the Explorers_ THERE was a glint of sun on metal. It came through the branches of the willows at the edge of the homestead clearing. A bit of red cloth wavered beside it. Again the metal shone with a twinkling flash, again the scarlet patch nodded in the light. Beneath the willows the prow of a canoe pushed silently from the Wabash River into the mouth of a little creek that wandered through the farm. Obadiah Holman crouched motionless like a rabbit when he caught that flash. At the canoe's movement forward he bounded toward home, as a frightened rabbit leaps from danger. "Indians!" he signaled to his father. "Indians!" The father, who was unhitching his horses, hastily got them into the log barn. With the flintlock on his arm as it had been all through the fall plowing in this natural open glade of his section of land, he, too, leaped for the cabin, which was already being barricaded by the boy and his mother. Through peepholes the family watched. Soon a solitary figure appeared. "That can't be an Indian," breathed the mother; "but it may be some kind of an Indian decoy." "We will hold our aim on him and keep under cover," the father decided. They could see that the new-comer had a mobile, laughing face. His clothes were of fur, picked out with bright cloth, somewhat ragged. A bandana tied back his grizzled curls to show the gold hoops in his ears. A strap across his forehead bore the weight of a pack which hung down his back. He was playing a lively tune upon an elder flute, stepping to its measures with his moccasined feet. While eying the man to be sure that he was not a treacherous disguised Indian, and to decide what sort of a chance comer he might be, the father's brow wrinkled with thoughts of this big Northwest and the men it had known and the origin of this wayfarer. "Whom have we here, Doby?" he asked. But Doby could not answer. Neither could his mother. Both were on the verge of panic. For it is a nerve-racking thing to stand still and wait for the next movement of a doubtful visitor, who may be going to send a burning arrow into the barn loft or to call a band of warriors to attack the house. To give his wife and son a chance to collect their wits, the father queried: "Who were the first white folks to come to this part of the country? Perhaps we can guess who this man is." "The French came earliest," answered the mother. "When?" "About a hundred years ago," she said. "What did they do?" "They built a fort and trading post at Miamis where Fort Wayne now is. Then they set up another at Ouiatanon and still another one here." As she stared at the motley figure coming nearer, the mother smiled, for she began to understand that she was now to meet quite a different sort of habitant from any of the varied peoples she had seen in the long journey to this old French settlement of Vincennes.