CHAPTER XXIII
AND SO IT ENDED
Our story must end here, because at this point its current flows away forever from old Vincennes; and it was only of the post on the Wabash that we set out to make a record. What befell Alice and Beverley after they went to Virginia we could go on to tell; but that would be another story. Suffice it to say, they lived happily ever after, or at least somewhat beyond three score and ten, and left behind them a good name and numerous descendants.
How Alice found out her family in Virginia, we are not informed; but after a lapse of some years from the date of her marriage, there appears in one of her letters a reference to an estate inherited from her Tarleton ancestors, and her name appears in old records signed in full, Alice Tarleton Beverley. A descendant of hers still treasures the locket, with its broken miniature and battered crest, which won Beverley's life from Long-Hair, the savage. Beside it, as carefully guarded, is the Indian charm-stone that stopped Hamilton's bullet over Alice's heart The rapiers have somehow disappeared, and there is a tradition in the Tarleton family that they were given by Alice to Gaspard Roussillon, who, after Madame Roussillon's death in 1790, went to New Orleans, where he stayed a year or two before embarking for France, whither he took with him the beautiful pair of colechemardes and Jean the hunchback.
Oncle Jazon lived in Vincennes many years after the war was over; but he died at Natchez, Mississippi, when ninety-three years old. He said, with almost his last breath, that he couldn't shoot very well, even in his best days; but that he had, upon various occasions, "jes' kind o' happened to hit a Injun in the lef' eye." They used to tell a story, as late as General Harrison's stay in Vincennes, about how Oncle Jazon buried his collection of scalps, with great funeral solemnity, as his part of the celebration of peace and independence about the year 1784.
Good old Father Beret died suddenly soon after Alice's marriage and departure for Virginia. He was found lying face downward on the floor of his cabin. Near him, on a smooth part of a puncheon, were the mildewed fragments of a letter, which he had been arranging, as if to read its contents. Doubtless it was the same letter brought to him by Rene de Ronville, as recorded in an early chapter of our story. The fragments were gathered up and buried with him. His dust lies under the present Church of St. Xavier,-- the dust of as noble a man and as true a priest as ever sacrificed himself for the good of humanity.
In after years Simon Kenton visited Beverley and Alice in their Virginia home. To his dying day he was fond of describing their happy and hospitable welcome and the luxuries to which they introduced him. They lived in a stately white mansion on a hill overlooking a vast tobacco plantation, where hundreds of negro slaves worked and sang by day and frolicked by night. Their oldest child was named Fitzhugh Gaspard. Kenton died in 1836.
There remains but one little fact worth recording before we close the book. In the year 1800, on the fourth of July, a certain leading French family of Vincennes held a patriotic reunion, during which a little old flag was produced and its story told. Some one happily proposed that it be sent to Mrs. Alice Tarleton Beverley with a letter of explanation, and in profound recognition of the glorious circumstances which made it the true flag of the great Northwest,
And so it happened that Alice's little banner went to Virginia and is still preserved in an old mansion not very far from Monticello; but it seems likely that the Wabash Valley will soon again possess the precious relic. The marriage engagement of Miss Alice Beverley to a young Indiana officer, distinguished for his patriotism and military ardor, has been announced at the old Beverley homestead on the hill, and the high contracting parties have planned that the wedding ceremony shall take place under the famous little flag, on the anniversary of dark's capture of Post Vincennes. When the bride shall be brought to her new home on the banks of the Wabash, the flag will come with her; but Oncle Jazon will not be on hand with his falsetto shout: "VIVE LA BANNIERE D'ALICE ROUSSILLON! VIVE ZHORZZH VASINTON!"