← catalogue

Heralds of Empire

by Agnes C. Laut · English · Gutenberg #18182 · 418,138 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Heralds of Empire
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Heralds of Empire

Author: Agnes C. Laut


        
Release date: April 15, 2006 [eBook #18182]
                Most recently updated: December 13, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18182

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERALDS OF EMPIRE ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which
      includes the original illustration (Radisson's map).
      See 18182-h.htm or 18182-h.zip:
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/1/8/18182/18182-h/18182-h.htm)
      or
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/1/8/18182/18182-h.zip)





HERALDS OF EMPIRE

Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope
Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade

by

A. C. LAUT

Author of Lords of the North







Toronto, Canada
William Briggs
1902
Entered according to Act of the
Parliament of Canada in the year 1902
By A. C. LAUT
at the Department of Agriculture
All rights reserved





DEDICATED

TO

THE NEW WORLD NOBILITY




----Now I learned how the man must have felt when he set about
conquering the elements, subduing land and sea and savagery.  And in
that lies the Homeric greatness of this vast fresh New World of ours.
Your Old World victor takes up the unfinished work left by generations
of men.  Your New World hero begins at the pristine task.  I pray you,
who are born to the nobility of the New World, forget not the glory of
your heritage; for the place which Got hath given you in the history of
the race is one which men must hold in envy when Roman patrician and
Norman conqueror and robber baron are as forgotten as the kingly lines
of old Egypt.----




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

Foreword


PART I

      I. What are King-Killers?
     II. I rescue and am rescued
    III. Touching Witchcraft
     IV. Rebecca and Jack Battle Conspire
      V. M. Radisson Again


PART II

     VI. The Roaring Forties
    VII. M. de Radisson Acts
   VIII. M. de Radisson Comes to his Own
     IX. Visitors
      X. The Cause of the Firing
     XI. More of M. Radisson's Rivals
    XII. M. Radisson begins the Game
   XIII. The White Darkness
    XIV. A Challenge
     XV. The Battle not to the Strong
    XVI. We seek the Inlanders
   XVII. A Bootless Sacrifice
  XVIII. Facing the End
    XIX. Afterward
     XX. Who the Pirates were
    XXI. How the Pirates came
   XXII. We leave the North Sea


PART III

  XXIII. A Change of Partners
   XXIV. Under the Aegis of the Court
    XXV. Jack Battle again
   XXVI. At Oxford
  XXVII. Home from the Bay
 XXVIII. Rebecca and I fall out
   XXIX. The King's Pleasure




ILLUSTRATION

Radisson's Map




HERALDS OF EMPIRE


FOREWORD

I see him yet--swarthy, straight as a lance, keen as steel, in his eyes
the restless fire that leaps to red when sword cuts sword.  I see him
yet--beating about the high seas, a lone adventurer, tracking forest
wastes where no man else dare go, pitting his wit against the intrigue
of king and court and empire.  Prince of pathfinders, prince of
pioneers, prince of gamesters, he played the game for love of the game,
caring never a rush for the gold which pawns other men's souls.  How
much of good was in his ill, how much of ill in his good, let his life
declare!  He played fast and loose with truth, I know, till all the
world played fast and loose with him.  He juggled with empires as with
puppets, but he died not a groat the richer, which is better record
than greater men can boast.

Of enemies, Sieur Radisson had a-plenty, for which, methinks, he had
that lying tongue of his to thank.  Old France and New France, Old
England and New England, would have paid a price for his head; but
Pierre Radisson's head held afar too much cunning for any hang-dog of
an assassin to try "fall-back, fall-edge" on him.  In spite of all the
malice with which his enemies fouled him living and dead, Sieur
Radisson was never the common buccaneer which your cheap pamphleteers
have painted him; though, i' faith, buccaneers stood high enough in my
day, when Prince Rupert himself turned robber and pirate of the high
seas.  Pierre Radisson held his title of nobility from the king; so did
all those young noblemen who went with him to the north, as may be seen
from M. Colbert's papers in the records _de la marine_.  Nor was the
disembarking of furs at Isle Percée an attempt to steal M. de la
Chesnaye's cargo, as slanderers would have us believe, but a way of
escape from those vampires sucking the life-blood of New France--the
farmers of the revenue.  Indeed, His Most Christian Majesty himself
commanded those robber rulers of Quebec to desist from meddling with
the northern adventurers.  And if some gentleman who has never been
farther from city cobblestones than to ride afield with the hounds or
take waters at foreign baths, should protest that no maid was ever in
so desolate a case as Mistress Hortense, I answer there are to-day many
in the same region keeping themselves pure as pond-lilies in a brackish
pool, at the forts of their fathers and husbands in the fur-trading
country. [1]

And as memory looks back to those far days, there is another--a poor,
shambling, mean-spoken, mean-clad fellow, with the scars of convict
gyves on his wrists and the dumb love of a faithful spaniel in his
eyes.  Compare these two as I may--Pierre Radisson, the explorer with
fame like a meteor that drops in the dark; Jack Battle, the
wharf-rat--for the life of me I cannot tell which memory grips the more.

One played the game, the other paid the pawn.  Both were misunderstood.
One took no thought but of self; the other, no thought of self at all.
But where the great man won glory that was a target for envy, the poor
sailor lad garnered quiet happiness.


[1] In confirmation of which reference may be called to the daughter of
Governor Norton in Prince of Wales Fort, north of Nelson.  Hearne
reports that the poor creature died from exposure about the time of her
father's death, which was many years after Mr. Stanhope had written the
last words of this record.--_Author_.




PART I


CHAPTER I

WHAT ARE KING-KILLERS?

My father--peace to his soul!--had been of those who thronged London
streets with wine tubs to drink the restored king's health on bended
knee; but he, poor gentleman, departed this life before his monarch
could restore a wasted patrimony.  For old Tibbie, the nurse, there was
nothing left but to pawn the family plate and take me, a spoiled lad in
his teens, out to Puritan kin of Boston Town.

On the night my father died he had spoken remorsefully of the past to
the lord bishop at his bedside.

"Tush, man, have a heart," cries his lordship.  "Thou'lt see pasch and
yule yet forty year, Stanhope.  Tush, man, 'tis thy liver, or a touch
of the gout.  Take here a smack of port.  Sleep sound, man, sleep
sound."

And my father slept so sound he never wakened more.

So I came to my Uncle Kirke, whose virtues were of the acid sort that
curdles the milk of human kindness.

With him, goodness meant gloom.  If the sweet joy of living ever sang
to him in his youth, he shut his ears to the sound as to siren
temptings, and sternly set himself to the fierce delight of being
miserable.

For misery he had reason enough.  Having writ a book in which he called
King Charles "a man of blood and everlasting abomination"--whatever
that might mean--Eli Kirke got himself star-chambered.  When, in the
language of those times, he was examined "before torture, in torture,
between torture, and after torture"--the torture of the rack and the
thumbkins and the boot--he added to his former testimony that the queen
was a "Babylonish woman, a Potiphar, a Jezebel, a--"

There his mouth was gagged, head and heels roped to the rack, and a
wrench given the pulleys at each end that nigh dismembered his poor,
torn body.  And what words, think you, came quick on top of his first
sharp outcry?

"Wisdom is justified of her children!  The wicked shall he pull down
and the humble shall he exalt!"

And when you come to think of it, Charles Stuart lost his head on the
block five years from that day.

When Eli Kirke left jail to take ship for Boston Town both ears had
been cropped.  On his forehead the letters S L--seditious libeler--were
branded deep, though not so deep as the bitterness burned into his soul.


There comes before me a picture of my landing, showing as clearly as it
were threescore years ago that soft, summer night, the harbour waters
molten gold in a harvest moon, a waiting group of figures grim above
the quay.  No firing of muskets and drinking of flagons and ringing of
bells to welcome us, for each ship brought out court minions to whip
Boston into line with the Restoration--as hungry a lot of rascals as
ever gathered to pick fresh bones.

Old Tibbie had pranked me out in brave finery: the close-cut,
black-velvet waistcoat that young royalists then wore; a scarlet
doublet, flaming enough to set the turkey yard afire; the silken hose
and big shoe-buckles late introduced from France by the king; and a
beaver hat with plumes a-nodding like my lady's fan.  My curls, I mind,
tumbled forward thicker than those foppish French perukes.

"There is thy Uncle Kirke," whispers Nurse Tibbie.  "Pay thy best
devoirs, Master Ramsay," and she pushes me to the fore of those
crowding up the docks.

A thin, pale man with a scarred face silently permitted me to salute
four limp fingers.  His eyes swept me with chill disapproval.  My hat
clapped on a deal faster than it had come off, for you must know we
unhatted in those days with a grand, slow bow.

"Thy Aunt Ruth," says Tibbie, nudging me; for had I stood from that day
to this, I was bound that cold man should speak first.

To my aunt the beaver came off in its grandest flourish.  The pressure
of a dutiful kiss touched my forehead, and I minded the passion kisses
of a dead mother.

Those errant curls blew out in the wind.

"Ramsay Stanhope," begins my uncle sourly, "what do you with uncropped
hair and the foolish trappings of vanity?"

As I live, those were the first words he uttered to me.

"I perceive silken garters," says he, clearing his throat and lowering
his glance down my person.  "Many a good man hath exchanged silk for
hemp, my fine gentleman!"

"An the hemp hold like silk, 'twere a fair exchange, sir," I returned;
though I knew very well he referred to those men who had died for the
cause.

"Ramsay," says he, pointing one lank fore-finger at me, "Ramsay, draw
your neck out of that collar; for the vanities of the wicked are a yoke
leading captive the foolish!"

Now, my collar was _point-de-vice_ of prime quality over black velvet.
My uncle's welcome was more than a vain lad could stomach; and what
youth of his first teens hath not a vanity hidden about him somewhere?

"Thou shalt not put the horse and the ass under the same yoke, sir,"
said I, drawing myself up far as ever high heels would lift.

He looked dazed for a minute.  Then he told me that he spake concerning
my spiritual blindness, his compassions being moved to show me the
error of my way.

At that, old nurse must needs take fire.

"Lord save a lad from the likes o' sich compassions!  Sure, sir, an the
good Lord makes pretty hair grow, 'twere casting pearls before swine to
shave his head like a cannon-ball"--this with a look at my uncle's
crown--"or to dress a proper little gentleman like a ragged
flibbergibbet."

"Tibbie, hold your tongue!" I order.

"Silence were fitter for fools and children," says Eli Kirke loftily.

There comes a time when every life must choose whether to laugh or weep
over trivial pains, and when a cut may be broken on the foil of that
glancing mirth which the good Creator gave mankind to keep our race
from going mad.  It came to me on the night of my arrival on the
wharves of Boston Town.

We lumbered up through the straggling village in one of those clumsy
coaches that had late become the terror of foot-passengers in London
crowds.  My aunt pointed with a pride that was colonial to the fine
light which the towns-people had erected on Beacon Hill; and told me
pretty legends of Rattlesnake Hill that fired the desire to explore
those inland dangers.  I noticed that the rubble-faced houses showed
lanterns in iron clamps above most of the doorways.  My kinsman's house
stood on the verge of the wilds-rough stone below, timbered plaster
above, with a circle of bay windows midway, like an umbrella.  High
windows were safer in case of attack from savages, Aunt Ruth explained;
and I mentally set to scaling rope ladders in and out of those windows.

We drew up before the front garden and entered by a turnstile with
flying arms.  Many a ride have little Rebecca Stocking, of the
court-house, and Ben Gillam, the captain's son, and Jack Battle, the
sailor lad, had, perched on that turnstile, while I ran pushing and
jumping on, as the arms flew creaking round.

The home-coming was not auspicious.  Yet I thought no resentment
against my uncle.  I realized too well how the bloody revenge of the
royalists was turning the hearts of England to stone.  One morning I
recall, when my poor father lay a-bed of the gout and there came a roar
through London streets as of a burst ocean dike.  Before Tibbie could
say no, I had snatched up a cap and was off.

God spare me another such sight!  In all my wild wanderings have I
never seen savages do worse.

Through the streets of London before the shoutings of a rabble rout was
whipped an old, white-haired man.  In front of him rumbled a cart; in
the cart, the axeman, laving wet hands; at the axeman's feet, the head
of a regicide--all to intimidate that old, white-haired man, fearlessly
erect, singing a psalm.  When they reached the shambles, know you what
they did?  Go read the old court records and learn what that sentence
meant when a man's body was cast into fire before his living eyes!  All
the while, watching from a window were the princes and their shameless
ones.

Ah, yes!  God wot, I understood Eli Kirke's bitterness!

But the beginning was not auspicious, and my best intentions presaged
worse.  For instance, one morning my uncle was sounding my
convictions--he was ever sounding other people's convictions--"touching
the divine right of kings."  Thinking to give strength to contempt for
that doctrine, I applied to it one forcible word I had oft heard used
by gentlemen of the cloth.  Had I shot a gun across the table, the
effect could not have been worse.  The serving maid fell all of a heap
against the pantry door.  Old Tibbie yelped out with laughter, and then
nigh choked.  Aunt Ruth glanced from me to Eli Kirke with a timid look
in her eye; but Eli Kirke gazed stolidly into my soul as he would read
whether I scoffed or no.

Thereafter he nailed up a little box to receive fines for blasphemy.

"To be plucked as a brand from the burning," I hear him say, fetching a
mighty sigh.  But sweet, calm Aunt Ruth, stitching at some spotless
kerchief, intercedes.

"Let us be thankful the lad hath come to us."

"Bound fast in cords of vanity," deplores Uncle Kirke.

"But all things are possible," Aunt Ruth softly interposes.

"All things are possible," concedes Eli Kirke grudgingly, "but thou
knowest, Ruth, all things are not probable!"

And I, knowing my uncle loved an argument as dearly as merry gentlemen
love a glass, slip away leg-bail for the docks, where sits Ben Gillam
among the spars spinning sailor yarns to Jack Battle, of the great
north sea, whither his father goes for the fur trade; or of M.
Radisson, the half-wild Frenchman, who married an English kinswoman of
Eli Kirke's and went where never man went and came back with so many
pelts that the Quebec governor wanted to build a fortress of beaver
fur; [1] or of the English squadron, rocking to the harbour tide, fresh
from winning the Dutch of Manhattan, and ready to subdue malcontents of
Boston Town.  Then Jack Battle, the sailor lad from no one knows where,
living no one knows how, digs his bare toes into the sand and asks
under his breath if we have heard about king-killers.

"What are king-killers?" demands young Gillam.

I discreetly hold my tongue; for a gentleman who supped late with my
uncle one night has strangely disappeared, and the rats in the attic
have grown boldly loud.

"What are king-killers?" asks Gillam.

"Them as sent Charles I to his death," explains Jack.  "They do say,"
he whispers fearfully, "one o' them is hid hereabouts now!  The king's
commission hath ordered to have hounds and Indians run him down."

"Pah!" says Gillam, making little of what he had not known, "hounds are
only for run-aways," this with a sneering look at odd marks round
Jack's wrists.

"I am no slave!" vows Jack in crestfallen tones.

"Who said 'slave'?" laughs Gillam triumphantly.  "My father saith he is
a runaway rat from the Barbadoes," adds Ben to me.

With the fear of a hunted animal under his shaggy brows, little Jack
tries to read how much is guess.

"I am no slave, Ben Gillam," he flings back at hazard; but his voice is
thin from fright.

"My father saith some planter hath lost ten pound on thee, little
slavie," continues Ben.

"Pah!  Ten pound for such a scrub!  He's not worth six!  Look at the
marks on his arms, Ramsay"--catching the sailor roughly by the wrist.
"He can say what he likes.  He knows chains."

Little Jack jerked free and ran along the sands as hard as his bare
feet could carry him.  Then I turned to Ben, who had always bullied us
both.  Dropping the solemn "thou's" which our elders still used, I let
him have plain "you's."

"You--you--mean coward!  I've a mind to knock you into the sea!"

"Grow bigger first, little billycock," taunts Ben.

By the next day I was big enough.

Mistress Hortense Hillary was down on the beach with M. Picot's
blackamoor, who dogged her heels wherever she went; and presently comes
Rebecca Stocking to shovel sand too.  Then Ben must show what a big
fellow he is by kicking over the little maid's cart-load.

"Stop that!" commands Jack Battle, springing of a sudden from the beach.

For an instant, Ben was taken aback.

Then the insolence that provokes its own punishment broke forth.

"Go play with your equals, jack-pudding!  Jailbirds who ape their
betters are strangled up in Quebec," and he kicked down Rebecca's pile
too.

Rebecca's doll-blue eyes spilled over with tears, but Mistress Hortense
was the high-mettled, high-stepping little dame.  She fairly stamped
her wrath, and to Jack's amaze took him by the hand and marched off
with the hauteur of an empress.

Then Ben must call out something about M. Picot, the French doctor, not
being what he ought, and little Hortense having no mother.

"Ben," said I quietly, "come out on the pier."  The pier ran to deep
water.  At the far end I spoke.

"Not another word against Hortense and Jack!  Promise me!"

His back was to the water, mine to the shore.  He would have promised
readily enough, I think, if the other monkeys had not followed--Rebecca
with big tear-drops on both cheeks, Hortense quivering with wrath, Jack
flushed, half shy and half shamed to be championed by a girl.

"Come, Ben; 'fore I count three, promise----"

But he lugged at me.  I dodged.  With a splash that doused us four, Ben
went headlong into the sea.  The uplift of the waves caught him.  He
threw back his arms with a cry.  Then he sank like lead.

The sailor son of the famous captain could not swim.  Rebecca's eyes
nigh jumped from her head with fright.  Hortense grew white to the lips
and shouted for that lout of a blackamoor sound asleep on the sand.

Before I could get my doublet off to dive, Jack Battle was cleaving air
like a leaping fish, and the waters closed over his heels.

Bethink you, who are not withered into forgetfulness of your own merry
youth, whether our hearts stopped beating then!

But up comes that water-dog of a Jack gripping Ben by the scruff of the
neck; and when by our united strength we had hauled them both on the
pier, little Mistress Hortense was the one to roll Gillam on his
stomach and bid us "Quick!  Stand him on his head and pour the water
out!"

From that day Hortense was Jack's slave, Jack was mine, and Ben was a
pampered hero because he never told and took the punishment like a man.
But there was never a word more slurring Hortense's unknown origin and
Jack's strange wrist marks.


[1] Young Stanhope's informant had evidently mixed tradition with fact.
Radisson was fined for going overland to Hudson Bay without the
governor's permission, the fine to build a fort at Three Rivers.  Eli
Kirke's kinswoman was a daughter of Sir John Kirke, of the Hudson's Bay
Fur Company.--_Author_.




CHAPTER II

I RESCUE AND AM RESCUED

So the happy childhood days sped on, a swift stream past flowered
banks.  Ben went off to sail the north sea in Captain Gillam's ship.
M. Picot, the French doctor, brought a governess from Paris for
Hortense, so that we saw little of our playmate, and Jack Battle
continued to live like a hunted rat at the docks.

My uncle and Rebecca's father, who were beginning to dabble in the fur
trade, had jointly hired a peripatetic dominie to give us youngsters
lessons in Bible history and the three R's.  At noon hour I initiated
Rebecca into all the thrilling dangers of Indian warfare, and many a
time have we had wild escapes from imaginary savages by scaling a rope
ladder of my own making up to the high nursery window.  By-and-bye,
when school was in and the dominie dozed, I would lower that timid
little whiffet of a Puritan maid out through the window to the
turnstile.  Then I would ride her round till our heads whirled.  If
Jack Battle came along, Rebecca would jump down primly and run in, for
Jack was unknown in the meeting-house, and the meeting-house was
Rebecca's measure of the whole world.

One day Jack lingered.  He was carrying something tenderly in a red
cambric handkerchief.

"Where is Mistress Hortense?" he asked sheepishly.

"That silly French woman keeps her caged like a squirrel."

Little Jack began tittering and giggling.

"Why--that's what I have here," he explained, slipping a bundle of soft
fur in my hand.

"It's tame!  It's for Hortense," said he.

"Why don't you take it to her, Jack?"

"Take it to her?" reiterated he in a daze.  "As long as she gets it,
what does it matter who takes it?"

With that, he was off across the marshy commons, leaving the squirrel
in my hand.

Forgetting lessons, I ran to M. Picot's house.  That governess answered
the knocker.

"From Jack Battle to Mistress Hortense!"

And I proffered the squirrel.

Though she smirked a world of thanks, she would not take it.  Then
Hortense came dancing down the hall.

"Am I not grown tall?" she asked, mischievously shaking her curls.

"No," said I, looking down to her feet cased in those high slippers
French ladies then wore, "'tis your heels!"

And we all laughed.  Catching sight of the squirrel, Hortense snatched
it up with caresses against her neck, and the French governess
sputtered out something of which I knew only the word "beau."

"Jack is no beau, mademoiselle," said I loftily.  "Pah!  He's a wharf
lad."

I had thought Hortense would die in fits.

"Mademoiselle means the squirrel, Ramsay," she said, choking, her
handkerchief to her lips.  "Tell Jack thanks, with my love," she
called, floating back up the stairs.

And the governess set to laughing in the pleasant French way that
shakes all over and has no spite.  Emboldened, I asked why Hortense
could not play with us any more.  Hortense, she explained, was become
too big to prank on the commons.

"Faith, mademoiselle," said I ruefully, "an she mayn't play war on the
commons, what may she play?"

"Beau!" teases mademoiselle, perking her lips saucily; and she shut the
door in my face.

It seemed a silly answer enough, but it put a notion in a lad's head.
I would try it on Rebecca.

When I re-entered the window, the dominie still slept.  Rebecca, the
demure monkey, bent over her lesson book as innocently as though there
were no turnstiles.

"Rebecca," I whispered, leaning across the bench, "you are big enough
to have a--what?  Guess."

"Go away, Ramsay Stanhope!" snapped Rebecca, grown mighty good of a
sudden, with glance fast on her white stomacher.

"O-ho!  Crosspatch," thought I; and from no other motive than
transgressing the forbidden, I reached across to distract the attentive
goodness of the prim little baggage; but--an iron grip lifted me bodily
from the bench.

It was Eli Kirke, wry-faced, tight-lipped.  He had seen all!  This was
the secret of Mistress Rebecca's new-found diligence.  No syllable was
uttered, but it was the awfullest silence that ever a lad heard.  I was
lifted rather than led upstairs and left a prisoner in locked room with
naught to do but gnaw my conscience and gaze at the woods skirting the
crests of the inland hills.

Those rats in the attic grew noisier, and presently sounds a mighty
hallooing outside, with a blowing of hunting-horns and baying of
hounds.  What ado was this in Boston, where men were only hunters of
souls and chasers of devils?  The rats fell to sudden quiet, and from
the yells of the rabble crowd I could make out only "King-killers!
King-killers!"  These were no Puritans shouting, but the blackguard
sailors and hirelings of the English squadron set loose to hunt down
the refugees.  The shouting became a roar.  Then in burst Eli Kirke's
front door.  The house was suddenly filled with swearings enough to
cram his blasphemy box to the brim.  There was a trampling of feet on
the stairs, followed by the crashing of overturned furniture, and the
rabble had rushed up with neither let nor hindrance and were searching
every room.

Who had turned informer on my uncle?  Was I not the only royalist in
the house?  Would suspicion fall on me?  But questions were put to
flight by a thunderous rapping on the door.  It gave as it had been
cardboard, and in tumbled a dozen ruffians with gold-lace doublets,
cockades and clanking swords.

Behind peered Eli Kirke, pale with fear, his eyes asking mine if I
knew.  True as eyes can speak, mine told him that I knew as well as he.

"Body o' me!  What-a-deuce?  Only a little fighting sparrow of a
royalist!" cried a swaggering colt of a fellow in officer's uniform.

"No one here, lad?" demanded a second.

And I saw Eli Kirke close his eyes as in prayer.

"Sir," said I, drawing myself up on my heels, "I don't understand you.
I--am here."

They bellowed a laugh and were tumbling over one another in their haste
up the attic stairs.  Then my blood went cold with fear, for the memory
of that poor old man going to the shambles of London flashed back.

A window lifted and fell in the attic gable.  With a rush I had slammed
the door and was craning out full length from the window-sill.  Against
the lattice timber-work of the plastered wall below the attic window
clung a figure in Geneva cloak, with portmanteau under arm.  It was the
man who had supped so late with Eli Kirke.

"Sir," I whispered, fearing to startle him from perilous footing, "let
me hold your portmanteau.  Jump to the slant roof below."

For a second his face went ashy, but he tossed me the bag, gained the
shed roof at a leap, snatched back the case, and with a "Lord bless
thee, child!" was down and away.

The spurred boots of the searchers clanked on the stairs.  A blowing of
horns!  They were all to horse and off as fast as the hounds coursed
away.  The deep, far baying of the dogs, now loud, now low, as the
trail ran away or the wind blew clear, told where the chase led inland.
If the fugitive but hid till the dogs passed he was safe enough; but of
a sudden came the hoarse, furious barkings that signal hot scent.

What had happened was plain.

The poor wretch had crossed the road and given the hounds clew.  The
baying came nearer.  He had discovered his mistake and was trying to
regain the house.

Balaam stood saddled to carry Eli Kirke to the docks.  'Twas a wan
hope, but in a twinkling I was riding like wind for the barking behind
the hill.  A white-faced man broke from the brush at crazy pace.

"God ha' mercy, sir," I cried, leaping off; "to horse and away!  Ride
up the brook bed to throw the hounds off."

I saw him in saddle, struck Balaam's flank a blow that set pace for a
gallop, turned, and--for a second time that day was lifted from the
ground.

"Pardieu!  Clean done!" says a low voice.  "'Tis a pretty trick!"

And I felt myself set up before a rider.

"To save thee from the hounds," says the voice.

Scarce knowing whether I dreamed, I looked over my shoulder to see one
who was neither royalist nor Puritan--a thin, swarth man, tall and
straight as an Indian, bare-shaven and scarred from war, with long,
wiry hair and black eyes full of sparks.

The pack came on in a whirl to lose scent at the stream, and my rescuer
headed our horse away from the rabble, doffing his beaver familiarly to
the officers galloping past.

"Ha!" called one, reining his horse to its haunches, "did that
snivelling knave pass this way?"

"Do you mean this little gentleman?"

The officer galloped off.  "Keep an eye open, Radisson," he shouted
over his shoulder.

"'Twere better shut," says M. Radisson softly; and at his name my blood
pricked to a jump.

Here was he of whom Ben Gillam told, the half-wild Frenchman, who had
married the royalist kinswoman of Eli Kirke; the hero of Spanish fights
and Turkish wars; the bold explorer of the north sea, who brought back
such wealth from an unknown land, governors and merchant princes were
spying his heels like pirates a treasure ship.

"'Tis more sport hunting than being hunted," he remarked, with an air
of quiet reminiscence.

His suit was fine-tanned, cream buckskin, garnished with gold braid
like any courtier's, with a deep collar of otter.  Unmindful of
manners, I would have turned again to stare, but he bade me guide the
horse back to my home.

"Lest the hunters ask questions," he explained.  "And what," he
demanded, "what doth a little cavalier in a Puritan hotbed?"

"I am even where God hath been pleased to set me, sir."

"'Twas a ticklish place he set thee when I came up."

"By your leave, sir, 'tis a higher place than I ever thought to know."

M. Radisson laughed a low, mellow laugh, and, vowing I should be a
court gallant, put me down before Eli Kirke's turnstile.

My uncle came stalking forth, his lips pale with rage.  He had blazed
out ere I could explain one word.

"Have I put bread in thy mouth, Ramsay Stanhope, that thou shouldst
turn traitor?  Viper and imp of Satan!" he shouted, shaking his
clinched fist in my face.  "Was it not enough that thou wert utterly
bound in iniquity without persecuting the Lord's anointed?"

I took a breath.

"Where is Balaam?" he demanded, seizing me roughly.

"Sir," said I, "for leaving the room without leave, I pray you to flog
me as I deserve.  As for the horse, he is safe and I hope far away
under the gentleman I helped down from the attic."

His face fell a-blank.  M. Radisson dismounted laughing.

"Nay, nay, Eli Kirke, I protest 'twas to the lad's credit.  'Twas this
way, kinsman," and he told all, with many a strange-sounding, foreign
expression that must have put the Puritan's nose out of joint, for Eli
Kirke began blowing like a trumpet.

Then out comes Aunt Ruth to insist that M. Radisson share a haunch of
venison at our noonday meal.

And how I wish I could tell you of that dinner, and of all that M.
Radisson talked; of captivity among Iroquois and imprisonment in Spain
and wars in Turkey; of his voyage over land and lake to a far north
sea, and of the conspiracy among merchant princes of Quebec to ruin
him.  By-and-bye Rebecca Stocking's father came in, and the three sat
talking plans for the northern trade till M. Radisson let drop that the
English commissioners were keen to join the enterprise.  Then the two
Puritans would have naught to do with it.

Long ago, as you know, we dined at midday; but so swiftly had the hour
flown with M. Radisson's tales of daring that Tibbie was already
lighting candles when we rose from the dinner table.

"And now," cried M. Radisson, lifting a stirrup-cup of home-brewed
October, "health to the little gentleman who saved a life to-day!
Health to mine host!  And a cup fathoms deep to his luck when Ramsay
sails yon sea!"

"He might do worse," said Eli Kirke grimly.

And the words come back like the echo of a prophecy.


I would have escaped my uncle, but he waylaid me in the dark at the
foot of the stairs.

"Ramsay," said he gently.

"Sir?" said I, wondering if flint could melt.

"'The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: the Lord make his face shine upon
thee, and be gracious unto thee: the Lord lift up his countenance upon
thee, and give thee peace!'"




CHAPTER III

TOUCHING WITCHCRAFT

That interrupted lesson with Rebecca finished my schooling.  I was set
to learning the mysteries of accounts in Eli Kirke's warehouse.

"How goes the keeping of accounts, Ramsay?" he questioned soon after I
had been in tutelage.

I had always intended to try my fortune in the English court when I
came of age, and the air of the counting-house ill suited a royalist's
health.

"Why, sir," I made answer, picking my words not to trip his
displeasure, "I get as much as I can--and I give as little as I can;
and those be all the accounts that ever I intend to keep."

Aunt Ruth looked up from her spinning-wheel in a way that had become an
alarm signal.  Eli Kirke glanced dubiously to the blasphemy box, as
though my words were actionable.  There was no sound but the drone of
the loom till I slipped from the room.  Then they both began to talk.
Soon after came transfer from the counting-house to the fur trade.
That took me through the shadowy forests from town to town, and when I
returned my old comrades seemed shot of a sudden from youth to manhood.

There was Ben Gillam, a giff-gaffing blade home from the north sea, so
topful of spray that salt water spilled over at every word.

"Split me fore and aft," exclaims Ben, "if I sail not a ship of my own
next year!  I'll take the boat without commission.  Stocking and my
father have made an offer," he hinted darkly.  "I'll go without
commission!"

"And risk being strangled for't, if the French governor catch you."

"Body o' me!" flouts Ben, ripping out a peck of oaths that had cost
dear and meant a day in the stocks if the elders heard, "who's going to
inform when my father sails the only other ship in the bay?  Devil sink
my soul to the bottom of the sea if I don't take a boat to Hudson Bay
under the French governor's nose!"

"A boat of your own," I laughed.  "What for, Ben?"

"For the same as your Prince Rupert, Prince Robber, took his.  Go out
light as a cork, come back loaded with Spanish gold to the water-line."
Ben paused to take a pinch of snuff and display his new embroidered
waist-coat.

"Look you at the wealth in the beaver trade," he added.  "M. Radisson
went home with George Carteret not worth a curse, formed the Fur
Company, and came back from Hudson Bay with pelts packed to the
quarter-deck.  Devil sink me! but they say, after the fur sale, the
gentlemen adventurers had to haul the gold through London streets with
carts!  Bread o' grace, Ramsay, have half an eye for your own purse!"
he urged.  "There is a life for a man o' spirit!  Why don't you join
the beaver trade, Ramsay?"

Why not, indeed?  'Twas that or turn cut-purse and road-lifter for a
youth of birth without means in those days.

Of Jack Battle I saw less.  He shipped with the fishing boats in the
summer and cruised with any vagrant craft for the winter.  When he came
ashore he was as small and eel-like and shy and awkward as ever, with
the same dumb fidelity in his eyes.

And what a snowy maid had Rebecca become!  Sitting behind her
spinning-wheel, with her dainty fingers darting in the sunlight, she
seemed the pink and whitest thing that ever grew, with a look on her
face of apple-blossoms in June; but the sly wench had grown mighty
demure with me.  When I laughed over that ending to our last lesson,
she must affect an air of injury.  'Twas neither her fault nor mine, I
declare, coaxing back her good-humour; 'twas the fault of the face.  I
wanted to see where the white began and the pink ended.  Then Rebecca,
with cheeks a-bloom under the hiding of her bonnet, quickens steps to
the meeting-house; but as a matter of course we walk home together, for
behind march the older folk, staidly discoursing of doctrine.

"Rebecca," I say, "you did not take your eyes off the preacher for one
minute."

"How do you know, Ramsay?" retorts Rebecca, turning her face away with
a dimple trembling in her chin, albeit it was the Sabbath.

"That preacher is too handsome to be sound in his doctrine, Rebecca."

Then she grows so mighty prim she must ask which heading of the sermon
pleases me best.

"I liked the last," I declare; and with that, we are at the turnstile.

Hortense became a vision of something lost, a type of what I had known
when great ladies came to our country hall.  M. Picot himself took her
on the grand tour of the Continent.  How much we had been hoping to see
more of her I did not realize till she came back and we saw less.

Once I encountered M. Picot and his ward on the wharf.  Her curls were
more wayward than of old and her large eyes more lustrous, full of
deep, new lights, dark like the flash of a black diamond.  Her form
appeared slender against the long, flowing mantilla shot with gold like
any grand dame's.  She wore a white beaver with plumes sweeping down on
her curls.  Indeed, little Hortense seemed altogether such a great lady
that I held back, though she was looking straight towards me.

"Give you good-e'en, Ramsay," salutes M. Picot, a small, thin man with
pointed beard, eyebrows of a fierce curlicue, and an expression under
half-shut lids like cat's eyes in the dark.  "Give you good-e'en!  Can
you guess who this is?"

As if any one could forget Hortense!  But I did not say so.  Instead, I
begged leave to welcome her back by saluting the tips of her gloved
fingers.  She asked me if I minded that drowning of Ben long ago.  Then
she wanted to know of Jack.

"I hear you are fur trading, Ramsay?" remarks M. Picot with the
inflection of a question.

I told him somewhat of the trade, and he broke out in almost the same
words as Ben Gillam.  'Twas the life for a gentleman of spirit.  Why
didn't I join the beaver trade of Hudson Bay?  And did I know of any
secret league between Captain Zachariah Gillam and Mr. Stocking to
trade without commission?

"Ah, Hillary," he sighed, "had we been beaver trading like Radisson
instead of pounding pestles, we might have had little Hortense
restored."

"Restored!" thought I.  And M. Picot must have seen my surprise, for he
drew back to his shell like a pricked snail.  Observing that the wind
was chill, he bade me an icy good-night.

I had no desire to pry into M. Picot's secrets, but I could not help
knowing that he had unbended to me because he was interested in the fur
trade.  From that 'twas but a step to the guess that he had come to New
England to amass wealth to restore Mistress Hortense.  Restore her to
what?  There I pulled up sharp.  'Twas none of my affair; and yet, in
spite of resolves, it daily became more of my affair.  Do what I would,
spending part of every day with Rebecca, that image of lustrous eyes
under the white beaver, the plume nodding above the curls, the slender
figure outlined against the gold-shot mantilla, became a haunting
memory.  Countless times I blotted out that mental picture with a sweep
of common sense.  "She was a pert miss, with her head full of French
nonsense and a nose held too high in air."  Then a memory of the eyes
under the beaver, and fancy was at it again spinning cobwebs in
moonshine.

M. Picot kept more aloof than formerly, and was as heartily hated for
it as the little minds of a little place ever hate those apart.

Occasionally, in the forest far back from the settlement, I caught a
flying glimpse of Lincoln green; and Hortense went through the woods,
hard as her Irish hunter could gallop, followed by the blackamoor,
churning up and down on a blowing nag.  Once I had the good luck to
restore a dropped gauntlet before the blackamoor could come.  With eyes
alight she threw me a flashing thanks and was off, a sunbeam through
the forest shades; and something was thumping under a velvet waistcoat
faster than the greyhound's pace.  A moment later, back came the hound
in springy stretches, with the riders at full gallop.

Her whip fell, but this time she did not turn.

But when I carried the whip to the doctor's house that night, M. Picot
received it with scant grace!

Whispers--gall-midges among evil tongues--were raising a buzz that
boded ill for the doctor.  France had paid spies among the English,
some said.  Deliverance Dobbins, a frumpish, fizgig of a maid, ever
complaining of bodily ills though her chuffy cheeks were red as
pippins, reported that one day when she had gone for simples she had
seen strange, dead things in the jars of M. Picot's dispensary.  At
this I laughed as Rebecca told it me, and old Tibbie winked behind the
little Puritan maid's head; for my father, like the princes, had known
that love of the new sciences which became a passion among gentlemen.
Had I not noticed the mole on the French doctor's cheek? Rebecca asked.
I had: what of it?

"The crops have been blighted," says Rebecca; though what connection
that had with M. Picot's mole, I could not see.

"Deliverance Dobbins oft hath racking pains," says Rebecca, with that
air of injury which became her demure dimples so well.

"Drat that Deliverance Dobbins for a low-bred mongrel mischief-maker!"
cries old Tibbie from the pantry door.

"Tibbie," I order, "hold your tongue and drop an angel in the blasphemy
box."

"'Twas good coin wasted," the old nurse vowed; but I must needs put
some curb on her royalist tongue, which was ever running a-riot in that
Puritan household.

It was an accident, in the end, that threw me across M. Picot's path.
I had gone to have him bind up a splintered wrist, and he invited me to
stay for a round of piquet.  I, having only one hand, must beg Mistress
Hortense to sort the cards for me.

She sat so near that I could not see her.  You may guess I lost every
game.

"Tut! tut!  Hillary dear, 'tis a poor helper Ramsay gained when he
asked your hand.  Pish! pish!" he added, seeing our faces crimson;
"come away," and he carried me off to the dispensary, as though his
preserved reptiles would be more interesting than Hortense.

With an indifference a trifle too marked, he brought me round to the
fur trade and wanted to know whether I would be willing to risk trading
without a license, on shares with a partner.

"Quick wealth that way, Ramsay, an you have courage to go to the north.
An it were not for Hortense, I'd hire that young rapscallion of a
Gillam to take me north."

I caught his drift, and had to tell him that I meant to try my fortune
in the English court.

But he paid small heed to what I said, gazing absently at the creatures
in the jars.

"'Twould be devilish dangerous for a girl," he muttered, pulling
fiercely at his mustache.

"Do you mean the court, sir?" I asked.

"Aye," returned the doctor with a dry laugh that meant the opposite of
his words.  "An you incline to the court, learn the tricks o' the
foils, or rogues will slit both purse and throat."

And all the while he was smiling as though my going to the court were
an odd notion.

"If I could but find a master," I lamented.

"Come to me of an evening," says M. Picot.  "I'll teach you, and you
can tell me of the fur trade."

You may be sure I went as often as ever I could.  M. Picot took me
upstairs to a sort of hunting room.  It had a great many ponderous oak
pieces carved after the Flemish pattern and a few little bandy-legged
chairs and gilded tables with courtly scenes painted on top, which he
said Mistress Hortense had brought back as of the latest French
fashion.  The blackamoor drew close the iron shutters; for, though
those in the world must know the ways of the world, worldling practices
were a sad offence to New England.  Shoving the furnishings aside, M.
Picot picked from the armory rack two slim foils resembling Spanish
rapiers and prepared to give me my lesson.  Carte and tierce, low carte
and flanconnade, he taught me with many a ringing clash of steel till
beads were dripping from our brows like rain-drops.

"Bravo!" shouted M. Picot in a pause.  "Are you son o' the Stanhope
that fought on the king's side?"

I said that I was.

"I knew the rascal that got the estate from the king," says M. Picot,
with a curious look from Hortense to me; and he told me of Blood, the
freebooter, who stole the king's crown but won royal favour by his
bravado and entered court service for the doing of deeds that bore not
the light of day.

Nightly I went to the French doctor's house, and I learned every wicked
trick of thrust and parry that M. Picot knew.  Once when I bungled a
foul lunge, which M. Picot said was a habit of the infamous Blood, his
weapon touched my chest, and Mistress Hortense uttered a sharp cry.

"What--what--what!" exclaims M. Picot, whirling on her.

"'Twas so real," murmurs Hortense, biting her lip.

After that she sat still enough.  Then the steel was exchanged for
cards; and when I lost too steadily M. Picot broke out: "Pish, boy,
your luck fails here!  Hillary, child, go practise thy songs on the
spinet."

Or: "Hortense, go mull us a smack o' wine!"

Or: "Ha, ha, little witch!  Up yet?  Late hours make old ladies."

And Hortense must go off, so that I never saw her alone but once.
'Twas the night before I was to leave for the trade.

The blackamoor appeared to say that Deliverance Dobbins was "a-goin' in
fits" on the dispensary floor.

"Faith, doctor," said I, "she used to have dumps on our turnstile."

"Yes," laughed Hortense, "small wonder she had dumps on that turnstile!
Ramsay used to tilt her backward."

M. Picot hastened away, laughing.  Hortense was in a great carved
high-back chair with clumsy, wooden cupids floundering all about the
tall head-rest.  Her face was alight in soft-hued crimson flaming from
an Arabian cresset stuck in sockets against the Flemish cabinet.

"A child's trick," began Hortense, catching at the shafts of light.

"I often think of those old days on the beach."

"So do I," said Hortense.

"I wish they could come back."

"So do I," smiled Hortense.  Then, as if to check more: "I suppose,
Ramsay, you would want to drown us all--Ben and Jack and Rebecca and
me."

"And I suppose you would want to stand us all on our heads," I retorted.

Then we both laughed, and Hortense demanded if I had as much skill with
the lyre as with the sword.  She had heard that I was much given to
chanting vain airs and wanton songs, she said.

And this is what I sang, with a heart that knocked to the notes of the
old madrigal like the precentor's tuning-fork to a meeting-house psalm:

  "Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting,
    Which, clad in damask mantles, deck the arbours,
    And then behold your lips where sweet love harbours,
  My eyes perplex me with a double doubting,
  Whether the roses be your lips, or your lips the roses."


Barely had I finished when Mistress Hortense seats herself at the
spinet, and, changing the words to suit her saucy fancy, trills off
that ballad but newly writ by one of our English courtiers:

  "Shall I, wasting in despair,
  Die because--_Rebecca's_--fair?
  Or make pale my cheeks with care
  'Cause _Rebecca's_ rosier are?"

"Hortense!" I protested.

  "Be _he_ fairer than the day
  Or the _June-field coils of hay_;
  If _he_ be not so to me,
  What care I how _fine_ he be?"

There was such merriment in the dark-lashed eyes, I defy Eli Kirke
himself to have taken offence; and so, like many another youth, I was
all too ready to be the pipe on which a dainty lady played her stops.
As the song faded to the last tinkling notes of the spinet her fingers
took to touching low, tuneless melodies like thoughts creeping into
thoughts, or perfume of flowers in the dark.  The melting airs slipped
into silence, and Hortense shut her eyes, "to get the memory of it,"
she said.  I thought she meant some new-fangled tune.

"This is memory enough for me," said I.

"Oh?" asked Hortense, and she uncovered all the blaze of the dark
lights hid in those eyes.

"Faith, Hortense," I answered, like a moth gone giddy in flame, "your
naughty music wakes echoes of what souls must hear in paradise."

"Then it isn't naughty," said Hortense, beginning to play fiercely,
striking false notes and discords and things.

"Hortense," said I.

"No--Ramsay!" cried Hortense, jangling harder than ever.

"But--yes!--Hortense----"

And in bustled M. Picot, hastier than need, methought.

"What, Hillary?  Not a-bed yet, child?  Ha!--crow's-feet under eyes
to-morrow!  Bed, little baggage!  Forget not thy prayers!  Pish!  Pish!
Good-night!  Good-night!"

That is the way an older man takes it.

"Now, devil fly away with that prying wench of a Deliverance Dobbins!"
ejaculated M. Picot, stamping about.  "Oh, I'll cure her fanciful fits!
Pish!  Pish!  That frump and her fits!  Bad blood, Ramsay; low-bred,
low-bred!  'Tis ever the way of her kind to blab of aches and stuffed
stomachs that were well if left empty.  An she come prying into my
chemicals, taking fits when she's caught, I'll mix her a pill o'
Deliverance!"  And M. Picot laughed heartily at his own joke.

The next morning I was off to the trade.  Though I hardly acknowledged
the reason to myself, any youth can guess why I made excuse to come
back soon.  As I rode up, Rebecca stood at our gate.  She had no smile.
Had I not been thinking of another, I had noticed the sadness of her
face; but when she moved back a pace, I flung out some foolishness
about a gate being no bar if one had a mind to jump.  Then she brought
me sharp to my senses as I sprang to the ground.

"Ramsay," she exclaimed, "M. Picot and Mistress Hortense are in jail
charged with sorcery!  M. Picot is like to be hanged!  An they do not
confess, they may be set in the bilboes and whipped.  There is talk of
putting Mistress Hortense to the test."

"The test!"

'Twas as if a great weight struck away power to think, for the test
meant neither more nor less than torture till confession were wrung
from agony.  The night went black and Rebecca's voice came as from some
far place.

"Ramsay, you are hurting--you are crushing my hands!"

Poor child, she was crying; and the words I would have said stuck fast
behind sealed lips.  She seemed to understand, for she went on:

"Deliverance Dobbins saw strange things in his house.  She went to spy.
He hath crazed her intellectuals.  She hath dumb fits."

Now I understood.  This trouble was the result of M. Picot's threat;
but little Rebecca's voice was tinkling on like a bell in a dome.

"My father hath the key to their ward.  My father saith there is like
to be trouble if they do not confess--"

"Confess!" I broke out.  "Confess what?  If they confess the lie they
will be burned for witchcraft.  And if they refuse to confess, they
will be hanged for not telling the lie.  Pretty justice!  And your holy
men fined one fellow a hundred pounds for calling their justices a pack
of jackasses----"

"Sentence is to be pronounced to-morrow after communion," said Rebecca.

"After communion?"  I could say no more.  On that of all days for
tyranny's crime!

God forgive me for despairing of mankind that night.  I thought freedom
had been won in the Commonwealth war, but that was only freedom of
body.  A greater strife was to wage for freedom of soul.




CHAPTER IV

REBECCA AND JACK BATTLE CONSPIRE

'Twas cockcrow when I left pacing the shore where we had so often
played in childhood; and through the darkness came the howl of M.
Picot's hound, scratching outside the prison gate.

As well reason with maniacs as fanatics, say I, for they hide as much
folly under the mask of conscience as ever court fool wore 'neath
painted face.  There was Mr. Stocking, as well-meaning a man as trod
earth, obdurate beyond persuasion against poor M. Picot under his
charge.  Might I not speak to the French doctor through the bars of his
window?  By no means, Mr. Stocking assured.  If once the great door
were unlocked, who could tell what black arts a sorcerer might use?

"Look you, Ramsay lad," says he, "I've had this brass key made against
his witchcraft, and I do not trust it to the hands of the jailer."

Then, I fear, I pleaded too keenly; for, suspecting collusion with M.
Picot, the warden of the court-house grew frigid and bade me ask Eli
Kirke's opinion on witchcraft.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,'" rasped Eli Kirke, his stern
eyes ablaze from an inner fire.  "'A man' also, or woman, that hath a
familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.'
Think you M. Picot burns incense to the serpent in his jars for the
healing of mankind?" he demanded fiercely.

"Yes," said I, "'tis for the healing of mankind by experimentation with
chemicals.  Knowledge of God nor chemicals springs full grown from
man's head, Uncle Eli.  Both must be learned.  That is all the meaning
of his jars and crucibles.  He is only trying to learn what laws God
ordained among materials.  And when M. Picot makes mistakes, it is the
same as when the Church makes mistakes and learns wisdom by blunders."

Eli Kirke blinked his eyes as though my monstrous pleadings dazed him.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,'" he cried doggedly.  "Do the
Scriptures lie, Ramsay Stanhope?  Tell me that?"

"No," said I.  "The Scriptures condemn liars, and the man who pretends
witchcraft _is_ a liar.  There's no such thing.  That is why the
Scriptures command burning."  I paused.  He made no answer, and I
pleaded on.

"But M. Picot denies witchcraft, and you would burn him for not lying."

Never think to gain a stubborn antagonist by partial concession.  M.
Radisson used to say if you give an enemy an inch he will claim an ell.
'Twas so with Eli Kirke, for he leaped to his feet in a fine frenzy and
bade me cease juggling Holy Writ.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,'" he shouted.  "'Tis
abomination!  It shall utterly be put away from you!  Because of this
hidden iniquity the colony hath fallen on evil days.  Let it perish
root and branch!"

But Tibbie breaks in upon his declamation by throwing wide the library
door, and in marches a line of pale-faced ascetics, rigid of jaw, cold
of eye, and exalted with that gloomy fervour which counts burning
life's highest joy.  Among them was the famous witch-hanger of after
years, a mere youth then, but about his lips the hard lines of a
spiritual zeal scarce differing from pride.

"God was awakening the churches by marvellous signs," said one,
extending a lank, cold hand to salute Eli Kirke.

"Have we not wrestled mightily for signs and wonders?" demanded another
with jaw of steel.  And one description of the generation seeking signs
was all but off the tip of my tongue.

"Some aver there be no witches--so fearfully hath error gone abroad,"
lamented young Mather, keen to be heard then, as he always was.
"Brethren, toleration would make a kingdom of chaos, a Sodom, a
Gomorrah, a Babylon!"

Faith, it needed no horoscope to forecast that young divine's dark
future!

I stood it as long as I could, with palms itching to knock their solemn
heads together like so many bowling balls; but when one
cadaverous-faced fellow, whose sanctity had gone bilious from lack of
sunshine, whined out against "the saucy miss," meaning thereby Mistress
Hortense, and another prayed Heaven through his nose that his daughter
might "lie in her grave ere she minced her steps with such
dissoluteness of hair and unseemly broideries and bright colours,
showing the lightness of her mind," and a third averred that "a
cucking-stool would teach a maid to walk more shamefacedly," I whirled
upon them in a fury that had disinherited me from Eli Kirke's graces
ere I spake ten words.

"Sirs," said I, "your slatternly wenches may be dead ere they match
Mistress Hortense!  As for wearing light colours, the devil himself is
painted black.  Let them who are doing shameful acts to the innocent
walk shamefacedly!  For shame, sirs, to cloak malice and jealousy of M.
Picot under religion!  New England will remember this blot against you
and curse you for it!  An you listen to Deliverance Dobbins's lies,
what hinders any lying wench sending good men to the scaffold?"

At first they listened agape, but now the hot blood rushed to their
faces.

"Hold thy tongue, lad!" roared Eli Kirke.  Then, as if to atone for
that violence: "The Lord rebuke thee," he added solemnly.

And I flung from the house dumb with impotent rage.

My thoughts were as the snatched sleep of a sick man's dreams.  Again
the hideous nightmare of the old martyr at the shambles; but now the
shambles were in the New World and the martyr was M. Picot.  Something
cold touched my hand through the dark, and there crouched M. Picot's
hound, whining for its master.  Automatically I followed across the
commons to the court-house square.  It stopped at the prison gate,
sniffing and whining and begging in.  Poor dog!  What could I do?  I
tried to coax it away, but it lay at the wall like a stone.

Of the long service in the new-built meeting-house I remember very
little.  Beat of drums, not bells, called to church in those days, and
the beat was to me as a funeral march.  The pale face of the preacher
in the high pulpit overtowering us all was alight with stern zeal.  The
elders, sitting in a row below the pulpit facing us, listened to the
fierce diatribe against the dark arts with looks of approbation that
boded ill for M. Picot; and at every fresh fusillade of texts to
bolster his argument, the line of deacons below the elders glanced back
at the preacher approvingly.  Rebecca sat on that side of the
congregation assigned to the women with a dumb look of sympathy on the
sweet hooded face.  The prisoners were not present.  At the end of the
service the preacher paused; and there fell a great hush in which men
scarce breathed, for sentence was to be pronounced.  But the preacher
only announced that before handing the case to the civil court of oyer
and terminer for judgment, the elders wished to hold it in meditation
for another day.

The singing of the dismissal psalm began and a smothered cry seemed to
break from Rebecca's pew.  Then the preacher had raised his hands above
bowed heads.  The service was over.  The people crowded solemnly out,
and I was left alone in the gathering darkness--alone with the ghosts
of youth's illusions mocking from the gloom.  Religion, then, did not
always mean right!  There were tyrants of souls as well as tyrants of
sword.  Prayers were uttered that were fitter for hearing in hell than
in Heaven.  Good men could deceive themselves into crime cloaking
spiritual malice, sect jealousy, race hatred with an unctuous text.
Here, in New England, where men had come for freedom, was tyranny
masking in the guise of religion.  Preachers as jealous of the power
slipping from their hands as ever was primate of England!  A poor
gentleman hounded to his death because he practised the sciences!
Millions of victims all the world over burned for witchcraft,
sacrificed to a Moloch of superstition in the name of a Christ who came
to let in the light of knowledge on all superstition!

Could I have found a wilderness where was no human face, I think I had
fled to it that night.  And, indeed, when you come to think of my
breaking with Eli Kirke, 'twas the witch trial that drove me to the
wilderness.

There was yet a respite.  But the Church still dominated the civil
courts, and a transfer of the case meant that the Church would throw
the onus of executing sentence on those lay figures who were the
puppets of a Pharisaical oligarchy.

There was no time to appeal to England.  There was no chance of sudden
rescue.  New England had not the stuff of which mobs are made.

I thought of appealing to the mercy of the judges; but what mercy had
Eli Kirke received at the hands of royalists that he should be merciful
to them?

I thought of firing the prison; but the walls were stone, and the night
wet, and the outcome doubtful.

I thought of the cell window; but if there had been any hope that way,
M. Picot had worked an escape.

Bowing my head to think--to pray--to imprecate, I lost all sense of
time and place.  Some one had slipped quietly into the dark of the
church.  I felt rather than saw a nearing presence.  But I paid no
heed, for despair blotted out all thought.  Whoever it was came feeling
a way down the dark aisle.

Then hot tears fell upon my hands.  In the gloom there paused a
childlike figure.

"Rebecca!"

She panted out a wordless cry.  Then she came closer and laid a hand on
my arm.  She was struggling to subdue sobs.  The question came in a
shivering breath.

"Is Hortense--so dear?"

"So dear, Rebecca."

"She must be wondrous happy, Ramsay." A tumult of effort.  "If I could
only take her place----"

"Take her place, Rebecca?"

"My father hath the key--if--if--if I took her place, she might go
free."

"Take her place, child!  What folly is this--dear, kind Rebecca?  Would
't be any better to send you to the rope than Hortense?  No--no--dear
child!"

At that her agitation abated, and she puzzled as if to say more.

"Dear Rebecca," said I, comforting her as I would a sister, "dear
child, run home.  Forget not little Hortense in thy prayers."

May the angel of forgiveness spread a broader mantle across our
blunders than our sins, but could I have said worse?

"I have cooked dainties with my own hands.  I have sent her cakes every
day," sobbed Rebecca.

"Go home now, Rebecca," I begged.

But she stood silent.

"Rebecca--what is it?"

"You have not been to see me for a year, Ramsay."

I could scarce believe my ears.

"My father is away to-night.  Will you not come?"

"But, Rebecca----"

"I have never asked a thing of you before."

"But, Rebecca----"

"Will you come for Hortense's sake?" she interrupted, with a little
sharp, hard, falsetto note in her baby voice.

"Rebecca," I demanded, "what do you mean?"

But she snapped back like the peevish child that she was: "An you come
not when I ask you, you may stay!"  And she had gone.

What was she trying to say with her dark hints and overnice scruples of
a Puritan conscience?  And was not that Jack Battle greeting her
outside in the dark?

I tore after Rebecca at such speed that I had cannoned into open arms
before I saw a hulking form across the way.

"Fall-back--fall-edge!" roared Jack, closing his arms about me.  "'Tis
Ramsay himself, with a sword like a butcher's cleaver and a wit like a
broadaxe!"

"Have you not heard, Jack?"

"Heard!  Ship ahoy!" cried Jack.  "Split me to the chin like a cod!
Stood I not abaft of you all day long, packed like a herring in a
pickle!  'Twas a pretty kettle of fish in your Noah's ark to-day!  'Tis
all along o' goodness gone stale from too much salt," says Jack.

I told him of little Rebecca, and asked what he made of it.  He said he
made of it that fools didn't love in the right place--which was not to
the point, whatever Jack thought of Rebecca.  Linking his arm through
mine, he headed me about.

"Captain Gillam, Ben's father, sails for England at sunrise," vouched
Jack.

"What has that to do with Mistress Hortense?" I returned testily.

"'Tis a swift ship to sail in."

"To sail in, Jack Battle?"--I caught at the hope.  "Out with your plan,
man!"

"And be hanged for it," snaps Jack, falling silent.

We were opposite the prison.  He pointed to a light behind the bars.

"They are the only prisoners," he said.  "They must be in there."

"One could pass a note through those bars with a long pole," I
observed, gazing over the yard wall.

"Or a key," answered Jack.

He paused before Rebecca's house to the left of the prison.

"Ramsay," inquired Jack quizzically, "do you happen to have heard who
has the keys?"

"Rebecca's father is warden."

"And Rebecca's father is from home to-night," says he, facing me
squarely to the lantern above the door.

How did he know that?  Then I remembered the voices outside the church.

"Jack--what did Rebecca mean----"

"Not to be hanged," interrupts Jack.  "'Tis all along o' having too
much conscience, Ramsay.  They must either lie like a Dutchman and be
damned, or tell the truth and be hanged.  Now, ship ahoy," says he, "to
the quarterdeck!" and he flung me forcibly up the steps.

Rebecca, herself, red-eyed and reserved, threw wide the door.  She
motioned me to a bench seat opposite the fireplace and fastened her
gaze above the mantel till mine followed there too.  A bunch of keys
hung from an iron rack.

"What are those, Rebecca?"

"The largest is for the gate," says she with the panic of conscience
running from fire.  "The brass one unlocks the great door,
and--and--the--M. Picot's cell unbolts," she stammered.

"May I examine them, Rebecca?"

"I will even draw you a pint of cider," says Rebecca evasively, with
great trepidation, "but come back soon," she called, tripping off to
the wine-cellar door.

Snatching the keys, I was down the steps at a leap.

"The large one for the gate, Jack!  The brass one for the big door, and
the cell unbolts!"

"Ease your helm, sonny!" says Jack, catching the bunch from my clasp.
"Fall-back--fall-edge!" he laughed in that awful mockery of the
axeman's block.  "Fall-back--fall-edge!  If there's any hacking of
necks, mine is thicker than yours!  I'll run the risks.  Do you wait
here in shadow."

And he darted away.  The gate creaked as it gave.

Then I waited for what seemed eternity.

A night-watchman shuffled along with swinging lantern, calling out:
"What ho?  What ho?"  Townsfolks rode through the streets with a
clatter of the chairmen's feet; but no words were bandied by the
fellows, for a Sabbath hush lay over the night.  A great hackney-coach
nigh mired in mud as it lumbered through mid-road.  And M. Picot's
hound came sniffing hungrily to me.

A glare of light shot aslant the dark.  Softly the door of Rebecca's
house opened.  A frail figure was silhouetted against the light.  The
wick above snuffed out.  The figure drew in without a single look,
leaving the door ajar.  But an hour ago, the iron righteousness of
bigots had filled my soul with revolt.  Now the sight of that little
Puritan maid brought prayers to my lips and a Te Deum to my soul.

The prison gate swung open again with rusty protest.  Two hooded
figures slipped through the dark.  Jack Battle had locked the gate and
the keys were in my hand.

"Take them back," he gurgled out with school-lad glee.  "'Twill be a
pretty to-do of witchcraft to-morrow when they find a cell empty.  Go
hire passage to England in Captain Gillam's boat!"

"Captain Gillam's boat?"

"Yes, or Master Ben's pirate-ship of the north, if she's there," and he
had dashed off in the dark.

When Rebecca appeared above the cellar-way with a flagon that reamed to
a beaded top, the keys were back on the wall.

"I was overlong," panted Rebecca, with eyes averted as of old to the
folds of her white stomacher.  "'Twas a stubborn bung and hard to draw."

"Dear little cheat!  God bless you!--and bless you!--and bless you,
Rebecca!" I cried.

At which the poor child took fright.

"It--it--it was not all a lie, Ramsay," she stammered.  "The bung was
hard--and--and--and I didn't hasten----"

"Dear comrade--good-bye, forever!" I called from the dark-of the step.

"Forever?" asked the faint voice of a forlorn figure black in the
doorway.

Dear, snowy, self-sacrificing spirit--'tis my clearest memory of her
with the thin, grieved voice coming through the dark.

I ran to the wharf hard as ever heels nerved by fear and joy and
triumph and love could carry me.  The passage I easily engaged from the
ship's mate, who dinned into my unlistening ears full account of the
north sea, whither Captain Gillam was to go for the Fur Company, and
whither, too, Master Ben was keen to sail, "a pirateer, along o' his
own risk and gain," explained the mate with a wink, "pirateer or
privateer, call 'em what you will, Mister; the Susan with white sails
in Boston Town, and Le Bon Garçon with sails black as the devil himself
up in Quebec, ha--ha--and I'll give ye odds on it, Mister, the devil
himself don't catch Master Ben!  Why, bless you, gentlemen, who's to
jail 'im here for droppin' Spanish gold in his own hold and poachin'
furs on the king's preserve o' the north sea, when Stocking, the
warden, 'imself owns 'alf the Susan and Cap'en Gillam, 'is father, is
master o' the king's ship?"

"They do say," he babbled on, "now that Radisson, the French
jack-a-boots, hath given the slip to the King's Company, he sails from
Quebec in ship o' his own.  If him and Ben and the Capiten meet--oh,
there'll be times!  There'll be times!"

And "times" there were sure enough; but of that I had then small care
and shook the loquacious rascal off so that he left me in peace.

First came the servants, trundling cart-loads of cases, which passed
unnoticed; for the town bell had tolled the close of Sabbath, and
Monday shipping had begun.

The cusp of a watery moon faded in the gray dawn streaks of a muffled
sky, and at last came the chairmen, with Jack running alert.

From the chairs stepped the blackamoor, painted as white as paste.
Then a New Amsterdam gentleman slipped out from the curtains, followed
by his page-boy and servants.

"Jack," I asked, "where is Hortense?"

The page glanced from under curls.

"Dear Jack," she whispered, standing high on her heels nigh as tall as
the sailor lad.  And poor Jack Battle, not knowing how to play down,
stood blushing, cap in hand, till she laughed a queer little laugh and,
bidding him good-bye, told him to remember that she had the squirrel
stuffed.

To me she said no word.  Her hand touched mine quick farewell.  The
long lashes lifted.

There was a look on her face.

I ask no greater joy in Paradise than memory of that look.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

One lone, gray star hung over the masthead.  The ship careened across
the billows till star and mast-top met.

Jack fetched a deep sigh.

"There be work for sailors in England," he said.

In a flash I thought that I knew what he had meant by fools not loving
in the right place.

"That were folly, Jack!  She hath her station!"

Jack Battle pointed to the fading steel point above the vanishing
masthead.

"Doth looking hurt yon star?" asks Jack.

"Nay; but looking may strain the eyes; and the arrows of longing come
back void."

He answered nothing, and we lingered heavy hearted till the sun came up
over the pillowed waves turning the tumbling waters to molten gold.

Between us and the fan-like rays behind the glossy billows--was no ship.

Hortense was safe!

There was an end-all to undared hopes.




CHAPTER V

M. RADISSON AGAIN

"Good-bye to you, Ramsay," said Jack abruptly.

"Where to, Jack?" I asked, bestirring myself.  I could no more go back
to Eli Kirke.

But little Jack Battle was squirming his wooden clogs into the sand as
he used to dig his toes, and he answered not a word.

"'Tis early yet for the Grand Banks, Jack.  Ben Gillam's ship keeled
mast over hull from being ice-logged last spring.  The spars were solid
with frozen sleet from the crosstrees to the crow's nest.  Your dories
would be ice-logged for a month yet."

"It--it--it aren't the Grand Banks no more," stammered Jack.

His manner arrested me.  The honest blue eyes were shifting and his
toes at work in the sand.

"There be gold on the high seas for the taking," vouched Jack.  "An
your fine gentlemen grow rich that way, why mayn't I?"

"Jack," I warned, thinking of Ben Gillam's craft rigged with sails of
as many colours as Joseph's coat, "Jack--is it a pirate-ship?"

"No," laughed the sailor lad sheepishly, "'tis a pirateer," meaning
thereby a privateer, which was the same thing in those days.

"Have a care of your pirateers--privateers, Jack," said I, speaking
plain.  "A gentleman would be run through the gullet with a clean
rapier, but you--you--would be strangled by sentence of court or sold
to the Barbadoes."

"Not if the warden o' the court owns half the ship," protested Jack,
smiling queerly under his shaggy brows.

"Oh--ho!" said I, thinking of Rebecca's father, and beginning to
understand who supplied money for Ben Gillam's ventures.

"I'm tired o' being a kick-a-toe and fisticuff to everybody.  Now, if
I'd been rich and had a ship, I might 'a' sailed for M. Picot."

"Or Mistress Hortense," I added, which brought red spots to the sailor
lad's cheeks.

Off he went unanswering, leaving me at gaze across an unbroken sea with
a heart heavy as lead.

"Poor fellow!  He will get over it," said I.

"Another hath need o' the same medicine," came a voice.

I wheeled, expecting arrest.

A tall, wiry man, with coal-black hair and deep-set eyes and a scar
across his swarth skin, smiled pleasantly down at me.

"Now that you have them safely off," said he, still smiling, "better
begone yourself."

"I'll thank you for your advice when I ask it, sir," said I, suspicious
of the press-gang infesting that port.  Involuntarily I caught at my
empty sword-belt.

"Permit me," proffered the gentleman, with a broader smile, handing out
his own rapier.

"Sir," said I, "your pardon, but the press-gang have been busy of late."

"And the sheriffs may be busy to-day," he laughed.  "Black arts don't
open stone walls, Ramsay."

And he sent the blade clanking home to its scabbard.  His surtout
falling open revealed a waistcoat of buckskin.  I searched his face.

"M. de Radisson!"

"My hero of rescues," and he offered his hand.  "And my quondam
nephew," he added, laughing; for his wife was a Kirke of the English
branch, and my aunt was married to Eli.

"Eli Kirke cannot know you are here, sir--"

"Eli Kirke _need_ not know," emphasized Radisson dryly.

And remembering bits of rumour about M. Radisson deserting the English
Fur Company, I hastened to add: "Eli Kirke _shall_ not know!"

"Your wits jump quick enough sometimes," said he.  "Now tell me, whose
is she, and what value do you set on her?"

I was speechless with surprise.  However wild a life M. Radisson led,
his title of nobility was from a king who awarded patents to gentlemen
only.

"We neither call our women '_she_' nor give them market value," I
retorted.

Thereupon M.  de Radisson falls in such fits of laughter, I had thought
he must split his baldrick.

"Pardieu!" he laughed, wiping the tears away with a tangled lace thing
fit for a dandy, "Pardieu!  'Tis not your girl-page?  'Tis the ship o'
that hangdog of a New England captain!"

The thing came in a jiffy.  Sieur Radisson, having deserted the English
Fur Company, was setting up for himself.  He was spying the strength of
his rivals for the north sea.

"You praised my wit.  I have but given you a sample."

Then I told him all I knew of the ship, and M. de Radisson laughed
again till he was like to weep.

"How is she called?" he asked.

"The Prince Rupert," said I.

"Ha!  Then the same crew of gentlemen's scullions and courtiers' valets
stuffing the lockers full o' trash to trade on their master's account.
A pretty cheat for the Company!"

The end of it was, M. Radisson invited me to join his ships.  "A
beaver-skin for a needle, Ramsay!  Twenty otter for an awl!  Wealth for
a merchant prince," he urged.

But no sooner had I grasped at this easy way out of difficulty than the
Frenchman interrupts: "Hold back, man!  Do you know the risk?"

"No--nor care one rush!"

"Governor Frontenac demands half of the furs for a license to trade,
but M. de la Barre, who comes to take his place, is a friend of La
Chesnaye's, and La Chesnaye owns our ships----"

"And you go without a license?"

"And the galleys for life----"

"If you're caught," said I.

"Pardieu!" he laughed, "yes--if we're caught!"

"I'd as lief go to the galleys for fur-trading as the scaffold for
witchcraft," said I.

With that our bargain was sealed.




PART II




Now comes that part of a life which deals with what you will say no one
man could do, yet the things were done; with wonders stranger than
witchcraft, yet were true.  But because you have never lived a
sword-length from city pavement, nor seen one man holding his own
against a thousand enemies, I pray you deny not these things.

Each life is a shut-in valley, says the jonglière; but Manitou, who
strides from peak to peak, knows there is more than one valley, which
had been a maxim among the jonglières long before one Danish gentleman
assured another there were more things in heaven and earth than
philosophy dreamed.




CHAPTER VI

THE ROARING FORTIES

Keen as an arrow from twanging bowstring, Pierre Radisson set sail over
the roaring seas for the northern bay.

'Twas midsummer before his busy flittings between Acadia and Quebec
brought us to Isle Percée, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence.  Here
Chouart Groseillers (his brother-in-law) lay with two of the craziest
craft that ever rocked anchor.  I scarce had time to note the bulging
hulls, stout at stem and stern with deep sinking of the waist, before
M. Radisson had climbed the ship's ladder and scattered quick commands
that sent sailors shinning up masts, for all the world like so many
monkeys.  The St. Pierre, our ship was called, in honour of Pierre
Radisson; for admiral and captain and trader, all in one, was Sieur
Radisson, himself.  Indeed, he could reef a sail as handily as any old
tar.  I have seen him take the wheel and hurl Allemand head-foremost
from the pilot-house when that sponge-soaked rascal had imbibed more
gin than was safe for the weathering of rocky coasts.

Call him gamester, liar, cheat--what you will!  He had his faults,
which dogged him down to poverty and ruin; but deeds are proof of the
inner man.  And look you that judge Pierre Radisson whether your own
deeds ring as mettle and true.

The ironwood capstan bars clanked to that seaman's music of running
sailors.  A clattering of the pawls--the anchor came away.  The St.
Pierre shook out her bellying sails and the white sheets drew to a full
beam wind.  Long foam lines crisped away from the prow.  Green shores
slipped to haze of distance.  With her larboard lipping low and that
long break of swishing waters against her ports which is as a croon to
the seaman's ear, the St. Pierre dipped and rose and sank again to the
swell of the billowing sea.  Behind, crowding every stitch of canvas
and staggering not a little as she got under weigh, ploughed the Ste.
Anne.  And all about, heaving and falling like the deep breathings of a
slumbering monster, were the wide wastes of the sea.

And how I wish that I could take you back with me and show you the two
miserable old gallipots which M. de Radisson rode into the roaring
forties!  'Twas as if those gods of chance that had held riotous sway
over all that watery desolation now first discovered one greater than
themselves--a rebel 'mid their warring elements whose will they might
harry but could not crush--Man, the king undaunted, coming to his own!
Children oft get closer to the essences of truth than older folk grown
foolish with too much learning.  As a child I used to think what a
wonderful moment that was when Man, the master, first appeared on face
of earth.  How did the beasts and the seas and the winds feel about it,
I asked.  Did they laugh at this fellow, the most helpless of all
things, setting out to conquer all things?  Did the beasts pursue him
till he made bow and arrow and the seas defy him till he rafted their
waters and the winds blow his house down till he dovetailed his
timbers?  That was the child's way of asking a very old question--Was
Man the sport of the elements, the plaything of all the cruel, blind
gods of chance?

Now, the position was reversed.

Now, I learned how the Man must have felt when he set about conquering
the elements, subduing land and sea and savagery.  And in that lies the
Homeric greatness of this vast, fresh, New World of ours.  Your Old
World victor takes up the unfinished work left by generations of men.
Your New World hero begins at the pristine task.  I pray you, who are
born to the nobility of the New World, forget not the glory of your
heritage; for the place which God hath given you in the history of the
race is one which men must hold in envy when Roman patrician and Norman
conqueror and robber baron are as forgotten as the kingly lines of old
Egypt.

Fifty ton was our craft, with a crazy pitch to her prow like to take a
man's stomach out and the groaning of infernal fiends in her timbers.
Twelve men, our crew all told, half of them young gentlemen of fortune
from Quebec, with titles as long as a tilting lance and the fighting
blood of a Spanish don and the airs of a king's grand chamberlain.
Their seamanship you may guess.  All of them spent the better part of
the first weeks at sea full length below deck.  Of a calm day they
lolled disconsolate over the taffrail, with one eye alert for flight
down the companionway when the ship began to heave.

"What are you doing back there, La Chesnaye?" asks M. de Radisson, with
a quiet wink, not speaking loud enough for fo'castle hands to hear.

"Cursing myself for ever coming," growls that young gentleman, scarce
turning his head.

"In that case," smiles Sieur Radisson, "you might be better occupied
learning to take a hand at the helm."

"Sir," pleads La Chesnaye meekly, "'tis all I can do to ballast the
ship below stairs."

"'Tis laziness, La Chesnaye," vows Radisson.  "Men are thrown overboard
for less!"

"A quick death were kindness, sir," groans La Chesnaye, scalloping in
blind zigzags for the stair.  "May I be shot from that cannon, sir, if
I ever set foot on ship again!"

M. de Radisson laughs, and the place of the merchant prince is taken by
the marquis with a face the gray shade of old Tibbie's linen
a-bleaching on the green.

The Ste. Anne, under Groseillers--whom we called Mr. Gooseberry when he
wore his airs too mightily--was better manned, having able-bodied
seamen, who distinguished themselves by a mutiny.

Of which you shall hear anon.

But the spirits of our young gentlemen took a prodigious leap upward as
their bodies became used to the crazy pace of our ship, whose gait I
can compare only to the bouncings of loose timber in a heavy sea.
North of Newfoundland we were blanketed in a dirty fog.  That gave our
fine gentlemen a chance to right end up.

"Every man of them a good seaman in calm weather," Sieur Radisson
observed; and he put them through marine drill all that week.  La
Chesnaye so far recovered that he sometimes kept me company at the
bowsprit, where we watched the clumsy gambols of the porpoise, racing
and leaping and turning somersets in mid-air about the ship.  Once, I
mind the St. Pierre gave a tremor as if her keel had grated a reef; and
a monster silver-stripe heaved up on our lee.  'Twas a finback whale,
M. Radisson explained; and he protested against the impudence of
scratching its back on our keel.  As we sailed farther north many a
school of rolling finbacks glistened silver in the sun or rose higher
than our masthead, when one took the death-leap to escape its leagued
foes--swordfish and thrasher and shark.  And to give you an idea of the
fearful tide breaking through the narrow fiords of that rock-bound
coast, I may tell you that La Chesnaye and I have often seen those
leviathans of the deep swept tail foremost by the driving tide into
some land-locked lagoon and there beached high on naked rock.  That was
the sea M. Radisson was navigating with cockle-shell boats unstable of
pace as a vagrant with rickets.

Even Forêt, the marquis, forgot his dainty-fingered dignity and took a
hand at the fishing of a shark one day.  The cook had put out a bait at
the end of a chain fastened to the capstan, when comes a mighty tug;
and the cook shouts out that he has caught a shark.  All hands are
hailed to the capstan, and every one of my fine gentlemen grasps an
ironwood bar to hoist the monster home.  I wish you had seen their
faces when the shark's great head with six rows of teeth in its gaping
upper jaw came abreast the deck!  Half the fellows were for throwing
down the bars and running, but the other half would not show white
feather before the common sailors; and two or three clanking rounds
brought the great shark lashing to deck in a way that sent us scuttling
up the ratlines.  But Forêt would not be beaten.  He thrust an ironwood
bar across the gaping jaws.  The shark tore the wood to splinters.
There was a rip that snapped the cable with the report of a pistol, and
the great fish was over deck and away in the sea.

By this, you may know, we had all left our landsmen's fears far south
of Belle Isle and were filled with the spirit of that wild, tempestuous
world where the storm never sleeps and the cordage pipes on calmest day
and the beam seas break in the long, low, growling wash that warns the
coming hurricane.

But if you think we were a Noah's ark of solemn faces 'mid all that
warring desolation, you are much mistaken.  I doubt if lamentations
ever did as much to lift mankind to victory as the naughty glee of the
shrieking fife.  And of glee, we had a-plenty on all that voyage north.

La Chesnaye, son of the merchant prince who owned our ships, played
cock-o'-the-walk, took rank next to M. Radisson, and called himself
deputy-governor.  Forêt, whose father had a stretch of barren shingle
on The Labrador, and who had himself received letters patent from His
Most Christian Majesty for a marquisate, swore he would be cursed if he
gave the _pas_ to La Chesnaye, or any other commoner.  And M. de
Radisson was as great a stickler for fine points as any of the
new-fledged colonials.  When he called a conference, he must needs
muster to the quarter-deck by beat of drum, with a tipstaff, having a
silver bauble of a stick, leading the way.  This office fell to
Godefroy, the trader, a fellow with the figure of a slat and a scalp
tonsured bare as a billiard-ball by Indian hunting-knife.  Spite of
many a thwack from the flat of M. de Radisson's sword, Godefroy would
carry the silver mace to the chant of a "diddle-dee-dee," which he was
always humming in a sand-papered voice wherever he went.  At beat of
drum for conference we all came scrambling down the ratlines like
tumbling acrobats of a country fair, Godefroy grasps his silver stick.

"Fall in line, there, deputy-governor, diddle-dee-dee!"

La Chesnaye cuffs the fellow's ears.

"Diddle-dee-dee!  Come on, marquis.  Does Your High Mightiness give
place to a merchant's son?  Heaven help you, gentlemen!  Come on!  Come
on!  Diddle-dee-dee!"

And we all march to M. de Radisson's cabin and sit down gravely at a
long table.

"Pot o' beer, tipstaff," orders Radisson; and Godefroy goes off
slapping his buckskins with glee.

M. Radisson no more takes off his hat than a king's ambassador, but he
waits for La Chesnaye and Forêt to uncover.  The merchant strums on the
table and glares at the marquis, and the marquis looks at the skylight,
waiting for the merchant; and the end of it is M. Radisson must give
Godefroy the wink, who knocks both their hats off at once, explaining
that a landsman can ill keep his legs on the sea, and the sea is no
respecter of persons.  Once, at the end of his byplay between the two
young fire-eaters, the sea lurched in earnest, a mighty pitch that
threw tipstaff sprawling across the table.  And the beer went full in
the face of the marquis.

"There's a health to you, Forêt!" roared the merchant in whirlwinds of
laughter.

But the marquis had gone heels over head.  He gained his feet as the
ship righted, whipped out his rapier, vowed he would dust somebody's
jacket, and caught up Godefroy on the tip of his sword by the rascal's
belt.

"Forêt, I protest," cried M. Radisson, scarce speaking for laughter, "I
protest there's nothing spilt but the beer and the dignity!  The beer
can be mopped.  There's plenty o' dignity in the same barrel.  Save
Godefroy!  We can ill spare a man!"

With a quick rip of his own rapier, Radisson had cut Godefroy's belt
and the wretch scuttled up-stairs out of reach.  Sailors wiped up the
beer, and all hands braced chairs 'twixt table and wall to await M.
Radisson's pleasure.

He had dressed with unusual care.  Gold braid edged his black doublet,
and fine old Mechlin came back over his sleeves in deep ruffs.  And in
his eyes the glancing light of steel striking fire.

Bidding the sailors take themselves off, M. Radisson drew his blade
from the scabbard and called attention by a sharp rap.

Quick silence fell, and he laid the naked sword across the table.  His
right hand played with the jewelled hilt.  Across his breast were
medals and stars of honour given him by many monarchs.  I think as we
looked at our leader every man of us would have esteemed it honour to
sail the seas in a tub if Pierre Radisson captained the craft.

But his left hand was twitching uneasily at his chin, and in his eyes
were the restless lights.

"Gentlemen," says he, as unconcerned as if he were forecasting weather,
"gentlemen, I seem to have heard that the crew of my kinsman's ship
have mutinied."

We were nigh a thousand leagues from rescue or help that day!

"Mutinied!" shrieks La Chesnaye, with his voice all athrill.
"Mutinied?  What will my father have to say?"

And he clapped his tilted chair to floor with a thwack that might have
echoed to the fo'castle.

"Shall I lend you a trumpet, La Chesnaye, or--or a fife?" asks M.
Radisson, very quiet.

And I assure you there was no more loud talk in the cabin that day;
only the long, low wash and pound and break of the seas abeam, with the
surly wail that portends storm.  I do not believe any of us ever
realized what a frail chip was between life and eternity till we heard
the wrenching and groaning of the timbers in the silence that followed
M. Radisson's words.

"Gentlemen," continues M. Radisson, softer-spoken than before, "if any
one here is for turning back, I desire him to stand up and say so."

The St. Pierre shipped a sea with a strain like to tear her asunder,
and waters went sizzling through lee scuppers above with the hiss of a
cataract.  M. Radisson inverts a sand-glass and watches the sand
trickle through till the last grain drops.  Then he turns to us.

Two or three faces had gone white as the driving spray, but never a man
opened his lips to counsel return.

"Gentlemen," says M. Radisson, with the fires agleam in his deep-set
eyes, "am I to understand that every one here is for going forward at
any risk?"

"Aye--aye, sir!" burst like a clarion from our circle.

Pierre Radisson smiled quietly.

"'Tis as well," says he, "for I bade the coward stand up so that I
could run him through to the hilt," and he clanked the sword back to
its scabbard.

"As I said before," he went on, "the crew on my kinsman's ship have
mutinied.  There's another trifle to keep under your caps,
gentlemen--the mutineers have been running up pirate signals to the
crew of this ship----"

"Pirate signals!" interrupts La Chesnaye, whose temper was ever
crackling off like grains of gunpowder.  "May I ask, sir, how you know
the pirate signals?"

M. de Radisson's face was a study in masks.

"You may ask, La Chesnaye," says he, rubbing his chin with a wrinkling
smile, "you may ask, but I'm hanged if I answer!"

And from lips that had whitened with fear but a moment before came
laughter that set the timbers ringing.

Then Forêt found his tongue.

"Hang a baker's dozen of the mutineers from the yard-arm!"

"A baker's dozen is thirteen, Forêt," retorted Radisson, "and the Ste.
Anne's crew numbers fifteen."

"Hang 'em in effigy as they do in Quebec," persists Forêt.

Pierre Radisson only pointed over his shoulder to the port astern.
Crowding to the glazed window we saw a dozen scarecrows tossing from
the crosstrees of Groseillers's ship.

"What does Captain Radisson advise?" asks La Chesnaye.

"La Chesnaye," says Radisson, "I never advise.  I act!"




CHAPTER VII

M. DE RADISSON ACTS

Quick as tongue could trip off the orders, eyes everywhere, thought and
act jumping together, Pierre Radisson had given each one his part, and
pledged our obedience, though he bade us walk the plank blindfold to
the sea.  Two men were set to transferring powder and arms from the
forehold to our captain's cabin.  One went hand over fist up the
mainmast and signalled the Ste. Anne to close up.  Jackets were torn
from the deck-guns and the guns slued round to sweep from stem to
stern.  With a jarring of cranes and shaking of timbers, the two ships
bumped together; and a more surprised looking lot of men than the crew
of the Ste. Anne you never saw.  Pierre Radisson had played the rogues
their own game in the matter of signals.  They had thought the St.
Pierre in league, else would they not have come into his trap so
readily.  Before they had time to protest, the ships were together, the
two captains conferring face to face across the rails, and our sailors
standing at arms ready to shoot down the first rebel.

At a word, the St. Pierre's crew were scrambling to the Ste. Anne's
decks.  A shout through the trumpet of the Ste. Anne's bo'swain and the
mutinous crew of the Ste. Anne were marched aboard the St. Pierre.

Then M. Radisson's plan became plain.  The other ship was the better.
M. de Radisson was determined that at least one crew should reach the
bay.  Besides, as he had half-laughingly insinuated, perhaps he knew
better than Chouart Groseillers of the Ste. Anne how to manage mutinous
pirates.  Of the St. Pierre's crew, three only remained with Radisson:
Allemand, in the pilot-house; young Jean Groseillers, Chouart's son, on
guard aft; and myself, armed with a musket, to sweep the fo'castle.

And all the time there was such a rolling sea the two ships were like
to pound their bulwarks to kindling wood.  Then the Ste. Anne eased
off, sheered away, and wore ship for open sea.

Pierre Radisson turned.  There faced him that grim, mutinous crew.

No need to try orders then.  'Twas the cat those men wanted.  Before
Pierre Radisson had said one word the mutineers had discovered the deck
cannon pointing amidships.  A shout of baffled rage broke from the
ragged group.  Quick words passed from man to man.  A noisy, shuffling,
indeterminate movement!  The crowd swayed forward.  There was a sudden
rush from the fo'castle to the waist.  They had charged to gain
possession of the powder cabin--Pierre Radisson raised his pistol.  For
an instant they held back.  Then a barefoot fellow struck at him with a
belaying-pin.

'Twere better for that man if he had called down the lightnings.

Quicker than I can tell it, Pierre Radisson had sprung upon him.  The
Frenchman's left arm had coiled the fellow round the waist.  Our
leader's pistol flashed a circle that drove the rabble back, and the
ringleader went hurling head foremost through the main hatch with force
like to flatten his skull to a gun-wad.  There was a mighty scattering
back to the fo'castle then, I promise you.

Pierre Radisson uttered never a syllable.  He pointed to the fore
scuttle.  Then he pointed to the men.  Down they went under
hatches--rats in a trap!

"Tramp--bundle--pack!" says he, as the last man bobbed below.

But with a ping that raised the hair from my head, came a pistol-shot
from the mainmasts.  There, perched astride of the crosstrees, was a
rascal mutineer popping at M. Radisson bold as you please.

Our captain took off his beaver, felt the bullet-hole in the brim,
looked up coolly, and pointed his musket.

"Drop that pistol!" said he.

The fellow yelped out fear.  Down clattered his weapon to the deck.

"Now sit there," ordered Radisson, replacing his beaver.  "Sit there
till I give you leave to come down!"

Allemand, the pilot, had lost his head and was steering a course
crooked as a worm fence.  Young Jean Groseillers went white as the
sails, and scarce had strength to slue the guns back or jacket their
muzzles.  And, instead of curling forward with the crest of the roll,
the spray began to chop off backward in little short waves like a
horse's mane--a bad, bad sign, as any seaman will testify.  And I, with
my musket at guard above the fo'scuttle, had a heart thumping harder
than the pounding seas.

And what do you think M. Radisson said as he wiped the sweat from his
brow?

"A pretty pickle,[1] indeed, to ground a man's plans on such dashed
impudence!  Hazard o' life!  As if a man would turn from his course for
them!  Spiders o' hell!  I'll strike my topmast to Death himself
first--so the devil go with them!  The blind gods may crush--they shall
not conquer!  They may kill--but I snap my fingers in their faces to
the death!  A pretty pickle, indeed!  Batten down the hatches, Ramsay.
Lend Jean a hand to get the guns under cover.  There's a storm!"

And "a pretty pickle" it was, with the "porps" floundering bodily from
wave-crest to wave-crest, the winds shrieking through the cordage, and
the storm-fiends brewing a hurricane like to engulf master and crew!

In the forehold were rebels who would sink us all to the bottom of the
sea if they could.  Aft, powder enough to blow us all to eternity!  On
deck, one brave man, two chittering lads, and a gin-soaked pilot
steering a crazy course among the fanged reefs of Labrador.

The wind backed and veered and came again so that a weather-vane could
not have shown which way it blew.  At one moment the ship was jumping
from wave to wave before the wind with a single tiny storms'l out.  At
another I had thought we must scud under bare poles for open sea.

The coast sheered vertical like a rampart wall, and up--up--up that
dripping rock clutched the tossing billows like watery arms of sirens.
It needed no seaman to prophecy the fate of a boat caught between that
rock and a nor'easter.

Then the gale would veer, and out raced a tidal billow of waters like
to take the St. Pierre broadside.

"Helm hard alee!" shouts Radisson in the teeth of the gale.

For the fraction of a second we were driving before the oncoming rush.

Then the sea rose up in a wall on our rear.

There was a shattering crash.  The billows broke in sheets of whipping
spray.  The decks swam with a river of waters.  One gun wrenched loose,
teetered to the roll, and pitched into the seething deep.  Yard-arms
came splintering to the deck.  There was a roaring of waters over us,
under us, round us--then M. de Radisson, Jean, and I went slithering
forward like water-rats caught in a whirlpool.  My feet struck against
windlass chains.  Jean saved himself from washing overboard by
cannoning into me; but before the dripping bowsprit rose again to mount
the swell, M. de Radisson was up, shaking off spray like a water-dog
and muttering to himself: "To be snuffed out like a candle--no--no--no,
my fine fellows!  Leap to meet it!  Leap to meet it!"

And he was at the wheel himself.

The ship gave a long shudder, staggered back, stern foremost, to the
trough of the swell, and lay weltering cataracts from her decks.

There was a pause of sudden quiet, the quiet of forces gathering
strength for fiercer assault; and in that pause I remembered something
had flung over me in the wash of the breaking sea.  I looked to the
crosstrees.  The mutineer was gone.

It was the first and last time that I have ever seen a smoking sea.
The ocean boiled white.  Far out in the wake of the tide that had
caught us foam smoked on the track of the ploughing waters.
Waters--did I say?  You could not see waters for the spray.

Then Jean bade me look how the stays'l had been torn to flutters, and
we both set about righting decks.

For all I could see, M. Radisson was simply holding the wheel; but the
holding of a wheel in stress is mighty fine seamanship.  To keep that
old gallipot from shipping seas in the tempest of billows was a more
ticklish task than rope-walking a whirlpool or sacking a city.

Presently came two sounds--a swish of seas at our stern and the booming
of surf against coast rocks.  Then M. de Radisson did the maddest thing
that ever I have seen.  Both sounds told of the coming tempest.  The
veering wind settled to a driving nor'easter, and M. de Radisson was
steering straight as a bullet to the mark for that rock wall.

But I did not know that coast.  When our ship was but three lengths
from destruction the St. Pierre answered to the helm.  Her prow rounded
a sharp rock.  Then the wind caught her, whirling her right about; but
in she went, stern foremost, like a fish, between the narrow walls of a
fiord to the quiet shelter of a land-locked lagoon.  Pierre Radisson
had taken refuge in what the sailors call "a hole in the wall."

There we lay close reefed, both anchors out, while the hurricane held
high carnival on the outer sea.

After we had put the St. Pierre ship-shape, M. Radisson stationed Jean
and me fore and aft with muskets levelled, and bade us shoot any man
but himself who appeared above the hatch.  Arming himself with his
short, curved hanger--oh, I warrant there would have been a carving
below decks had any one resisted him that day!--down he went to the
mutineers of the dim-lighted forehold.

Perhaps the storm had quelled the spirit of rebellion; but up came M.
de Radisson, followed by the entire crew--one fellow's head in white
cotton where it had struck the floor, and every man jumping keen to
answer his captain's word.

I must not forget a curious thing that happened as we lay at anchor.
The storm had scarce abated when a strange ship poked her jib-boom
across the entrance to the lagoon, followed by queer-rigged black sails.

"A pirate!" said Jean.

But Sieur de Radisson only puckered his brows, shifted position so that
the St. Pierre could give a broadside, and said nothing.

Then came the strangest part of it.  Another ship poked her nose across
the other side of the entrance.  This was white-rigged.

"Two ships, and they have us cooped!" exclaimed Jean.

"One sporting different sails," said M. de Radisson contemptuously.

"What do you think we should do, sir?" asked Jean.

"Think?" demanded Radisson.  "I have stopped thinking!  I act!  My
thoughts are acts."

But all the same his thought at that moment was to let go a broadside
that sent the stranger scudding.  Judging it unwise to keep a
half-mutinous crew too near pirate ships, M. Radisson ordered anchor
up.  With a deck-mop fastened in defiance to our prow, the St. Pierre
slipped out of the harbour through the half-dark of those northern
summer nights, and gave the heel to any highwayman waiting to attack as
she passed.

The rest of the voyage was a ploughing through brash ice in the
straits, with an occasional disembarking at the edge of some great
ice-field; but one morning we were all awakened from the heavy sleep of
hard-worked seamen by the screaming of a multitude of birds.  The air
was odorous with the crisp smell of woods.  When we came on deck, 'twas
to see the St. Pierre anchored in the cove of a river that raced to
meet the bay.

The screaming gulls knew not what to make of these strange visitors;
for we were at Port Nelson--Fort Bourbon, as the French called it.

And you must not forget that we were French on _that_ trip!


[1] These expressions are M. de Radisson's and not words coined by Mr.
Stanhope, as may be seen by reference to the French explorer's account
of his own travels, written partly in English, where he repeatedly
refers to a "pretty pickle."  As for the ships, they seem to have been
something between a modern whaler and old-time brigantine.--_Author_.




CHAPTER VIII

M. DE RADISSON COMES TO HIS OWN

The sea was touched to silver by the rising sun--not the warm, red sun
of southern climes, nor yet the gold light of the temperate zones, but
the cold, clear steel of that great cold land where all the warring
elements challenge man to combat.  Browned by the early frosts, with a
glint of hoar rime on the cobwebs among the grasses, north, south, and
west, as far as eye could see, were boundless reaches of hill and
valley.  And over all lay the rich-toned shadows of early dawn.

The broad river raced not to meet the sea more swiftly than our pulses
leaped at sight of that unclaimed world.  'Twas a kingdom waiting for
its king.  And its king had come!  Flush with triumph, sniffing the
nutty, autumn air like a war-horse keen for battle, stood M. Radisson
all impatience for the conquest of new realms.  His jewelled sword-hilt
glistened in the sun.  The fire that always slumbered in the deep-set
eyes flashed to life; and, fetching a deep breath, he said a queer
thing to Jean and me.

"'Tis good air, lads," says he; "'tis free!"

And I, who minded that bloody war in which my father lost his all, knew
what the words meant, and drank deep.

But for the screaming of the birds there was silence of death.  And,
indeed, it was death we had come to disenthrone.  M. Radisson issued
orders quick on top of one another, and the sailors swarmed from the
hold like bees from a hive.  The drum beat a roundelay that set our
blood hopping.  There were trumpet-calls back and forth from our ship
to the Ste. Anne.  Then, to a whacking of cables through blocks, the
gig-boats touched water, and all hands were racing for the shore.
Godefroy waved a monster flag--lilies of France, gold-wrought on cloth
of silk--and Allemand kept beating--and beating--and beating the drum,
rumbling out a "Vive le Roi!" to every stroke.  Before the keel
gravelled on the beach, M. Radisson's foot was on the gunwale, and he
leaped ashore.  Godefroy followed, flourishing the French flag and
yelling at the top of his voice for the King of France.  Behind, wading
and floundering through the water, came the rest.  Godefroy planted the
flag-staff.  The two crews sent up a shout that startled those strange,
primeval silences.  Then, M. Radisson stepped forward, hat in hand,
whipped out his sword, and held it aloft.

"In the name of Louis the Great, King of France," he shouted, "in the
name of His Most Christian Majesty, the King of France, I take
possession of all these regions!"

At that, Chouart Groseillers shivered a bottle of wine against the
flag-pole.  Drums beat, fifes shrieked as for battle, and lusty cheers
for the king and Sieur Radisson rang and echoed and re-echoed from our
crews.  Three times did Allemand beat his drum and three times did we
cheer.  Then Pierre Radisson raised his sword.  Every man dropped to
knee.  Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and infidels, and
riff-raff adventurers who had no religion but what they swore by, bowed
their heads to the solemn thanks which Pierre Radisson uttered for safe
deliverance from perilous voyage. [1]

That was my first experience of the fusion which the New World makes of
Old World divisions.  We thought we had taken possession of the land.
No, no, 'twas the land had taken possession of us, as the New World
ever does, fusing ancient hates and rearing a new race, of which--I
wot--no prophet may dare too much!

"He who twiddles his thumbs may gnaw his gums," M. Radisson was wont to
say; and I assure you there was no twiddling of thumbs that morning.
Bare had M. Radisson finished prayers, when he gave sharp command for
Groseillers, his brother-in-law, to look to the building of the
Habitation--as the French called their forts--while he himself would go
up-stream to seek the Indians for trade.  Jean and Godefroy and I were
sent to the ship for a birch canoe, which M. Radisson had brought from
Quebec.

Our leader took the bow; Godefroy, the stern; Jean and I, the middle.
A poise of the steel-shod steering pole, we grasped our paddles, a
downward dip, quick followed by Godefroy at the stern, and out shot the
canoe, swift, light, lithe, alert, like a racer to the bit, with a
gurgling of waters below the gunwales, the keel athrob to the swirl of
a turbulent current and a trail of eddies dimpling away on each side.
A sharp breeze sprang up abeam, and M. Radisson ordered a blanket sail
hoisted on the steersman's fishing-pole.  But if you think that he
permitted idle paddles because a wind would do the work, you know not
the ways of the great explorer.  He bade us ply the faster, till the
canoe sped between earth and sky like an arrow shot on the level.  The
shore-line became a blur.  Clumps of juniper and pine marched abreast,
halted the length of time an eye could rest, and wheeled away.  The
swift current raced to meet us.  The canoe jumped to mount the glossy
waves raised by the beam wind.  An upward tilt of her prow, and we had
skimmed the swell like a winged thing.  And all the while M. Radisson's
eyes were everywhere.  Chips whirled past.  There were beaver, he said.
Was the water suddenly muddied?  Deer had flitted at our approach.  Did
a fish rise?  M. Radisson predicted otter; and where there were otter
and beaver and deer, there should be Indians.

As for the rest of us, it had gone to our heads.

We were intoxicated with the wine of the rugged, new, free life.  Sky
above; wild woods where never foot had trod; air that drew through the
nostrils in thirst-quenching draughts; blood atingle to the laughing
rhythm of the river--what wonder that youth leaped to a fresh life from
the mummified existence of little, old peoples in little, old lands?

We laughed aloud from fulness of life.

Jean laid his paddle athwart, ripped off his buckskin, and smiled back.

"Ramsay feels as if he had room to stretch himself," said he.

"Feel!  I feel as if I could run a thousand miles and jump off the ends
of the earth--"

"And dive to the bottom of the sea and harness whales and play
bowling-balls with the spheres, you young rantipoles," added M.
Radisson ironically.

"The fever of the adventurer," said Jean quietly.  "My uncle knows it."

I laughed again.  "I was wondering if Eli Kirke ever felt this way," I
explained.

"Pardieu," retorted M. de Radisson, loosening his coat, "if people
moved more and moped less, they'd brew small bile!  Come, lads!  Come,
lads!  We waste time!"

And we were paddling again, in quick, light strokes, silent from zest,
careless of toil, strenuous from love of it.

Once we came to a bend in the river where the current was so strong
that we had dipped our paddles full five minutes against the mill race
without gaining an inch.  The canoe squirmed like a hunter balking a
hedge, and Jean's blade splintered off to the handle.  But M. de
Radisson braced back to lighten the bow; the prow rose, a sweep of the
paddles, and on we sped!

"Hard luck to pull and not gain a boat length," observed Jean.

"Harder luck not to pull, and to be swept back," corrected M. de
Radisson.

We left the main river to thread a labyrinthine chain of waterways,
where were portages over brambly shores and slippery rocks, with the
pace set at a run by M. de Radisson.  Jean and I followed with the pack
straps across our foreheads and the provisions on our backs.  Godefroy
brought up the rear with the bark canoe above his head.

At one place, where we disembarked, M. de Radisson traced the sand with
the muzzle of his musket.

"A boot-mark," said he, drawing the faint outlines of a footprint, "and
egad, it's not a man's foot either!"

"Impossible!" cried Jean.  "We are a thousand miles from any white-man."

"There's nothing impossible on this earth," retorted Radisson
impatiently.  "But pardieu, there are neither white women in this
wilderness, nor ghosts wearing women's boots!  I'd give my right hand
to know what left that mark!"

After that his haste grew feverish.  We snatched our meals by turns
between paddles.  He seemed to grudge the waste of each night, camping
late and launching early; and it was Godefroy's complaint that each
portage was made so swiftly there was no time for that solace of the
common voyageur--the boatman's pipe.  For eight days we travelled
without seeing a sign of human presence but that one vague footmark in
the sand.

"If there are no Indians, how much farther do we go, sir?" asked
Godefroy sulkily on the eighth day.

"Till we find them," answered M. Radisson.

And we found them that night.

A deer broke from the woods edging the sand where we camped and had
almost bounded across our fire when an Indian darted out a hundred
yards behind.  Mistaking us for his own people, he whistled the
hunter's signal to head the game back.  Then he saw that we were
strangers.  Pulling up of a sudden, he threw back his arms, uttered a
cry of surprise, and ran to the hiding of the bush.

M. Radisson was the first to pursue; but where the sand joined the
thicket he paused and began tracing the point of his rapier round the
outlines of a mark.

"What do you make of it, Godefroy?" he demanded of the trader.

The trader looked quizzically at Sieur de Radisson.

"The toes of that man's moccasin turn out," says Godefroy significantly.

"Then that man is no Indian," retorted M. Radisson, "and hang me, if
the size is not that of a woman or a boy!"

And he led back to the beach.

"Yon ship was a pirate," began Godefroy, "and if buccaneers be
about----"

"Hold your clack, fool," interrupted M. Radisson, as if the fellow's
prattle had cut into his mental plannings; and he bade us heap such a
fire as could be seen by Indians for a hundred miles.  "If once I can
find the Indians," meditated he moodily, "I'll drive out a whole
regiment of scoundrels with one snap o' my thumb!"

Black clouds rolled in from the distant bay, boding a stormy night; and
Godefroy began to complain that black deeds were done in the dark, and
we were forty leagues away from the protection of our ships.

"A pretty target that fire will make of us in the dark," whined the
fellow.

M. Radisson's eyes glistened sparks.

"I'd as lief be a pirate myself, as be shot down by pirates," grumbled
the trader, giving a hand to hoist the shed of sheet canvas that was to
shield us from the rains now aslant against the seaward horizon.

At the words M. Radisson turned sharply; but the heedless fellow
gabbled on.

"Where is a man to take cover, an the buccaneers began shooting from
the bush behind?" demanded Godefroy belligerently.

M. Radisson reached one arm across the fire.  "I'll show you," said he.
Taking Godefroy by the ear, with a prick of the sword he led the lazy
knave quick march to the beach, where lay our canoe bottom up.

"Crawl under!"  M. Radisson lifted the prow.

From very shame--I think it was--Godefroy balked; but M. Radisson
brought a cutting rap across the rascal's heels that made him hop.  The
canoe clapped down, and Godefroy was safe.  "Pardieu," mutters
Radisson, "such cowards would turn the marrow o' men's bones to butter!"

Sitting on a log, with his feet to the fire, he motioned Jean and me to
come into the shelter of the slant canvas; for the clouds were rolling
overhead black as ink and the wind roared up the river-bed with a wall
of pelting rain.  M. Radisson gazed absently into the flame.  The steel
lights were at play in his eyes, and his lips parted.

"Storm and cold--man and beast--powers of darkness and devil--knaves
and fools and his own sins--he must fight them all, lads," says M.
Radisson slowly.

"Who must fight them all?" asks Jean.

"The victor," answers Radisson, and warm red flashed to the surface of
the cold steel in his eyes.

"Jean," he began, looking up quickly towards the gathering darkness of
the woods.

"Sir?"

"'Tis cold enough for hunters to want a fire."

"Is the fire not big enough?"

"Now, where are your wits, lad?  If hunters were hiding in that bush,
one could see this fire a long way off.  The wind is loud.  One could
go close without being heard.  Pardieu, I'll wager a good scout could
creep up to a log like this"--touching the pine on which we sat---"and
hear every word we are saying without a soul being the wiser!"

Jean turned with a start, half-suspecting a spy.  Radisson laughed.

"Must I spell it out?  Eh, lad, afraid to go?"

The taunt bit home.  Without a word Jean and I rose.

"Keep far enough apart so that one of you will escape back with the
news," called Radisson, as we plunged into the woods.

Of the one who might not escape Pierre Radisson gave small heed, and so
did we.  Jean took the river side and I the inland thicket, feeling our
way blindly through the blackness of forest and storm and night.  Then
the rain broke--broke in lashing whip-cords with the crackle of fire.
Jean whistled and I signalled back; but there was soon such a pounding
of rains it drowned every sound.  For all the help one could give the
other we might have been a thousand miles apart.  I looked back.  M.
Radisson's fire threw a dull glare into the cavernous upper darkness.
That was guide enough.  Jean could keep his course by the river.

It was plunging into a black nowhere.  The trees thinned.  I seemed to
be running across the open, the rain driving me forward like a wet
sail, a roar of wind in my ears and the words of M. Radisson ringing
their battle-cry--"Storm and cold--man and beast--powers of darkness
and devil--knaves and fools and his own sins--he must fight them
all!"--"Who?"--"The victor!"

Of a sudden the dripping thicket gave back a glint.  Had I run in a
circle and come again on M. Radisson's fire?  Behind, a dim glare still
shone against the sky.

Another glint from the rain drip, and I dropped like a deer hit on the
run.  Not a gunshot away was a hunter's fire.  Against the fire were
three figures.  One stood with his face towards me, an Indian dressed
in buckskin, the man who had pursued the deer.  The second was hid by
an intervening tree; and as I watched, the third faded into the
phaseless dark.  Who were these night-watchers?  I liked not that
business of spying--though you may call it scouting, if you will, but I
must either report nothing to M. Radisson, or find out more.

I turned to skirt the group.  A pistol-shot rang through the wood.  A
sword flashed to light.  Before I had time to think, but not--thanks to
M. Picot's lessons long ago--not before I had my own rapier out, an
assassin blade would have taken me unawares.

I was on guard.  Steel struck fire in red spots as it clashed against
steel.  One thrust, I know, touched home; for the pistol went whirling
out of my adversary's hand, and his sword came through the dark with
the hiss of a serpent.  Again I seemed to be in Boston Town; but the
hunting room had become a northland forest, M. Picot, a bearded man
with his back to the fire and his face in the dark, and our slim foils,
naked swords that pressed and parried and thrust in many a foul such as
the French doctor had taught me was a trick of the infamous Blood!
Indeed, I could have sworn that a woman's voice cried out through the
dark; but the rain was in my face and a sword striking red against my
own.  Thanks, yes, thanks a thousand times to M. Picot's lessons; for
again and yet again I foiled that lunge of the unscrupulous swordsman
till I heard my adversary swearing, between clinched teeth.  He
retreated.  I followed.  By a dexterous spring he put himself under
cover of the woods, leaving me in the open.  My only practice in
swordsmanship had been with M. Picot, and it was not till long years
after that I minded how those lessons seemed to forestall and counter
the moves of that ambushed assassin.  But the baffling thing was that
my enemy's moves countered mine in the very same way.

He had not seen my face, for my back was turned when he came up, and my
face in the shade when I whirled.  But I stood between the dark and the
fire.  Every motion of mine he could forecast, while I could but parry
and retreat, striving in vain to lure him out, to get into the dark, to
strike what I could not see, pushed back and back till I felt the rush
that aims not to disarm but to slay.

Our weapons rang with a glint of green lightnings.  A piece of steel
flew up.  My rapier had snapped short at the hilt.  A cold point was at
my throat pressing me down and back as the foil had caught me that
night in M. Picot's house.  To right, to left, I swerved, the last
blind rushes of the fugitive man. . . .

"Storm and cold--man and beast--powers of darkness and devil--he must
fight them all----"

The memory of those words spurred like a battle-cry.  Beaten?  Not yet!
"Leap to meet it!  Leap to meet it!"

I caught the blade at my throat with a naked hand.  Hot floods drenched
my face.  The earth swam.  We were both in the light now, a bearded man
pushing his sword through my hand, and I falling down.  Then my
antagonist leaped back with a shivering cry of horror, flung the weapon
to the ground and fled into the dark.

And when I sat up my right hand held the hilt of a broken rapier, the
left was gashed across the palm, and a sword as like my own as two peas
lay at my feet.

The fire was there.  But I was alone.


[1] Reference to M. Radisson's journal corroborates Mr. Stanhope in
this observance, which was never neglected by M. Radisson after season
of peril.  It is to be noted that he made his prayers after not at the
season of peril.




CHAPTER IX

VISITORS

The fire had every appearance of a night bivouac, but there was remnant
of neither camp nor hunt.  Somewhere on my left lay the river.  By that
the way led back to M. Radisson's rendezvous.  It was risky
enough--that threading of the pathless woods through the pitchy dark;
but he who pauses to measure the risk at each tread is ill fitted to
pioneer wild lands.

Who the assassin was and why he had so suddenly desisted, I knew no
more than you do!  That he had attacked was natural enough; for whoever
took first possession of no-man's-land in those days either murdered
his rivals or sold them to slavery.  But why had he flung his sword
down at the moment of victory?

The pelting of the rain softened to a leafy patter, the patter to a
drip, and a watery moon came glimmering through the clouds.  With my
enemy's rapier in hand I began cutting a course through the thicket.
Radisson's fire no longer shone.  Indeed, I became mighty uncertain
which direction to take, for the rush of the river merged with the
beating of the wind.  The ground sloped precipitously; and I was
holding back by the underbrush lest the bank led to water when an
indistinct sound, a smothery murmur like the gurgle of a subterranean
pool, came from below.

The wind fell.  The swirl of the flowing river sounded far from the
rear.  I had become confused and was travelling away from the true
course.  But what was that sound?

I threw a stick forward.  It struck hard stone.  At the same instant
was a sibilant, human--distinctly human--"Hss-h," and the sound had
ceased.

That was no laving of inland pond against pebbles.  Make of it what you
will--there were voices, smothered but talking.  "No-no-no" . . . then
the warning . . .  "Hush!" . . . then the wind and the river and . . .
"No--no!" with words like oaths. . . .  "No--I say, no!  Having come so
far, no!--not if it were my own brother!" . . . then the low
"Hush!" . . . and pleadings . . . then--"Send Le Borgne!"

And an Indian had rushed past me in the dark with a pine fagot in his
hand.

Rising, I stole after him.  'Twas the fellow who had been at the fire
with that unknown assailant.  He paused over the smouldering embers,
searching the ground, found the hilt of the broken sword, lifted the
severed blade, kicked leaves over all traces of conflict, and
extinguishing the fire, carried off the broken weapon.  An Indian can
pick his way over known ground without a torch.  What was this fellow
doing with a torch?  Had he been sent for me?  I drew back in shadow to
let him pass.  Then I ran with all speed to the river.

Gray dawn came over the trees as I reached the swollen waters, and the
sun was high in mid-heaven when I came to the gravel patch where M. de
Radisson had camped.  Round a sharp bend in the river a strange sight
unfolded.

A score of crested savages with painted bodies sat on the ground.  In
the centre, clad like a king, with purple doublet and plumed hat and
velvet waistcoat ablaze with medals of honour--was M. Radisson.  One
hand deftly held his scabbard forward so that the jewelled hilt shone
against the velvet, and the other was raised impressively above the
savages.  How had he made the savages come to him?  How are some men
born to draw all others as the sea draws the streams?

The poor creatures had piled their robes at his feet as offerings to a
god.

"What did he give for the pelts, Godefroy?" I asked.

"Words!" says Godefroy, with a grin, "gab and a drop o' rum diluted in
a pot o' water!"

"What is he saying to them now?"

Godefroy shrugged his shoulders.  "That the gods have sent him a
messenger to them; that the fire he brings "--he was handing a musket
to the chief--"will smite the Indians' enemy from the earth; that the
bullet is magic to outrace the fleetest runner"--this as M. Radisson
fired a shot into mid-air that sent the Indians into ecstasies of
childish wonder--"that the bottle in his hands contains death, and if
the Indians bring their hunt to the white-man, the white-man will never
take the cork out except to let death fly at the Indians' enemy"--he
lifted a little phial of poison as he spoke--"that the Indian need
never feel cold nor thirst, now that the white-man has brought
fire-water!"

At this came a harsh laugh from a taciturn Indian standing on the outer
rim of the crowd.  It was the fellow who had run through the forest
with the torch.

"Who is that, Godefroy?"

"Le Borgne."

"Le Borgne need not laugh," retorted M. de Radisson sharply.  "Le
Borgne knows the taste of fire-water!  Le Borgne has been with the
white-man at the south, and knows what the white-man says is true."

But Le Borgne only laughed the harder, deep, guttural, contemptuous
"huh-huh's!"--a fitting rebuke, methought, for the ignoble deception
implied in M. Radisson's words.

Indeed, I would fain suppress this part of M. Radisson's record, for he
juggled with truth so oft, when he thought the end justified the means,
he finally got a knack of juggling so much with truth that the means
would never justify any end.  I would fain repress the ignoble faults
of a noble leader, but I must even set down the facts as they are, so
you may see why a man who was the greatest leader and trader and
explorer of his times reaped only an aftermath of universal distrust.
He lied his way through thick and thin--as we traders used to say--till
that lying habit of his sewed him up in a net of his own weaving like a
grub in a cocoon.

Godefroy was giving a hand to bind up my gashed palm when something
grunted a "huff-huff" beside us.  Le Borgne was there with a queer look
on his inscrutable face.

"Le Borgne, you rascal, you know who gave me this," I began, taking
careful scrutiny of the Indian.

One eye was glazed and sightless, the other yellow like a fox's; but
the fellow was straight, supple, and clean-timbered as a fresh-hewn
mast.  With a "huh-huh," he gabbled back some answer.

"What does he say, Godefroy?"

"He says he doesn't understand the white-man's tongue--which is a lie,"
added Godefroy of his own account.  "Le Borgne was interpreter for the
Fur Company at the south of the bay the year that M. Radisson left the
English."

Were my assailants, then, Hudson's Bay Company men come up from the
south end of James Bay?  Certainly, the voice had spoken English.  I
would have drawn Godefroy aside to inform him of my adventure, but Le
Borgne stuck to us like a burr.  Jean was busy helping M. de Radisson
at the trade, or what was called "trade," when white men gave an awl
for forty beaver-skins.

"Godefroy," I said, "keep an eye on this Indian till I speak to M. de
Radisson."  And I turned to the group.  'Twas as pretty a bit of colour
as I have ever seen.  The sea, like silver, on one side; the
autumn-tinted woods, brown and yellow and gold, on the other; M. de
Radisson in his gay dress surrounded by a score of savages with their
faces and naked chests painted a gaudy red, headgear of swans' down,
eagle quills depending from their backs, and buckskin trousers fringed
with the scalp-locks of the slain.

Drawing M. de Radisson aside, I gave him hurried account of the night's
adventures.

"Ha!" says he.  "Not Hudson's Bay Company men, or you would be in
irons, lad!  Not French, for they spoke English.  Pardieu!  Poachers
and thieves--we shall see!  Where is that vagabond Cree?  These people
are southern Indians and know nothing of him.--Godefroy," he called.

Godefroy came running up.  "Le Borgne's gone," said Godefroy
breathlessly.

"Gone?" repeated Radisson.

"He left word for Master Stanhope from one who wishes him well--"

"One who wishes him well," repeated M. Radisson, looking askance at me.

"For Master Stanhope not to be bitten twice by the same dog!"

Our amazement you may guess: M. de Radisson, suspicious of treachery
and private trade and piracy on my part; I as surprised to learn that I
had a well-wisher as I had been to discover an unknown foe; and
Godefroy, all cock-a-whoop with his news, as is the way of the vulgar.

"Ramsay," said M. Radisson, speaking very low and tense, "As you hope
to live and without a lie, what--does--this--mean?"

"Sir, as I hope to live--I--do--not--know!"

He continued to search me with doubting looks.  I raised my wounded
hand.

"Will you do me the honour to satisfy yourself that wound is genuine?"

"Pish!" says he.

He studied the ground.  "There's nothing impossible on this earth.
Facts are hard dogs to down.--Jean," he called, "gather up the pelts!
It takes a man to trade well, but any fool can make fools drink!
Godefroy--give the knaves the rum--but mind yourselves," he warned,
"three parts rain-water!"  Then facing me, "Take me to that bank!"

He followed without comment.

At the place of the camp-fire were marks of the struggle.

"The same boot-prints as on the sand!  A small man," observed Radisson.

But when we came to the sloping bank, where the land fell sheer away to
a dry, pebbly reach, M. Radisson pulled a puzzled brow.

"They must have taken shelter from the rain.  They must have been under
your feet."

"But where are their foot-marks?" I asked.

"Washed out by the rain," said he; but that was one of the untruths
with which a man who is ever telling untruths sometimes deceives
himself; for if the bank sheltered the intruders from the rain, it also
sheltered their foot-marks, and there was not a trace.

"All the same," said M. de Radisson, "we shall make these Indians our
friends by taking them back to the fort with us."

"Ramsay," he remarked on the way, "there's a game to play."

"So it seems."

"Hold yourself in," said he sententiously.

I walked on listening.

"One plays as your friend, the other as your foe!  Show neither friend
nor foe your hand!  Let the game tell!  'Twas the reined-in horse won
King Charles's stakes at Newmarket last year!  Hold yourself in, I say!"

"In," I repeated, wondering at this homily.

"And hold yourself up," he continued.  "That coxcomb of a marquis
always trailing his dignity in the dust of mid-road to worry with a
common dog like La Chesnaye--pish!  Hold your self-respect in the chest
of your jacket, man!  'Tis the slouching nag that loses the race!  Hold
yourself up!"

His words seemed hard sense plain spoken.

"And let your feet travel on," he added.

"In and up and on!" I repeated.

"In and up and on--there's mettle for you, lad!"

And with that terse text--which, I think, comprehended the whole of M.
Radisson's philosophy--we were back at the beach.

The Indians were not in such a state as I have seen after many a
trading bout.  They were able to accompany us.  In embarking, M.
Radisson must needs observe all the ceremony of two races.  Such a
whiffing of pipes among the stately, half-drunk Indian chiefs you never
saw, with a pompous proffering of the stem to the four corners of the
compass, which they thought would propitiate the spirits.  Jean blew a
blast on the trumpet.  I waved the French flag.  Godefroy beat a
rattling fusillade on the drum, grabbed up his bobbing tipstaff, led
the way; and down we filed to the canoes.

At all this ostentation I could not but smile; but no man ever had
greater need of pomp to hold his own against uneven odds than Radisson.

As we were leaving came a noise that set us all by the ears--the dull
booming reverberations of heavy cannonading.

The Indians shook as with palsy.  Jean Groseillers cried out that his
father's ships were in peril.  Godefroy implored the saints; but with
that lying facility which was his doom, M. de Radisson blandly informed
the savages that more of his vessels had arrived from France.

Bidding Jean go on to the Habitation with the Indians, he took the rest
of us ashore with one redskin as guide, to spy out the cause of the
firing.

"'Twill be a pretty to-do if the English Fur Company's ships arrive
before we have a French fort ready to welcome them," said he.




CHAPTER X

THE CAUSE OF THE FIRING

The landing was but a part of the labyrinthine trickery in which our
leader delighted to play; for while Jean delayed the natives we ran
overland through the woods, launched our canoe far ahead of the Indian
flotilla, and went racing forward to the throbs of the leaping river.

"If a man would win, he must run fast as the hour-glass," observed M.
Radisson, poising his steering-pole.  "And now, my brave lads," he began,
counting in quick, sharp words that rang with command, "keep
time--one--two--three!  One--two--three!"  And to each word the paddles
dipped with the speed of a fly-wheel's spokes.

"One--two--three!  In and up and on!  An you keep yourselves in hand,
men, you can win against the devil's own artillery!  Speed to your
strokes, Godefroy," he urged.

And the canoe answered as a fine-strung racer to the spur.  Shore-lines
blurred to a green streak.  The frosty air met our faces in wind.
Gurgling waters curled from the prow in corrugated runnels.  And we were
running a swift race with a tumult of waves, mounting the swell, dipping,
rising buoyant, forward in bounds, with a roar of the nearing rapids, and
spray dashing athwart in drifts.  M. Radisson braced back.  The prow
lifted, shot into mid-air, touched water again, and went whirling through
the mill-race that boiled below a waterfall.  Once the canoe aimed
straight as an arrow for rocks in mid-current.  M. Radisson's steel-shod
pole flashed in the sun.  There was a quick thrust, answered by
Godefroy's counter-stroke at the stern; and the canoe grazed past the
rocks not a hair's-breadth off.

"Sainte Anne ha' mercy!" mumbled Godefroy, baling water from the canoe as
we breasted a turn in the river to calmer currents, "Sainte Anne ha'
mercy!  But the master'd run us over Niagara, if he had a mind."

"Or the River Styx, if 'twould gain his end," sharply added Radisson.

But he ordered our paddles athwart for snatched rest, while he himself
kept alert at the bow.  With the rash presumption of youth, I offered to
take the bow that he might rest; but he threw his head back with a loud
laugh, more of scorn than mirth, and bade me nurse a wounded hand.  On
the evening of the third day we came to the Habitation.  Without
disembarking, M. de Radisson sent the soldiers on sentinel duty at the
river front up to the fort with warning to prepare for instant siege.

"'Twill put speed in the lazy rascals to finish the fort," he remarked;
and the canoe glided out to mid-current again for the far expanse of the
bay.

By this we were all so used to M. Radisson's doings, 'twould not have
surprised us when the craft shot out from river-mouth to open sea if he
had ordered us to circumnavigate the ocean on a chip.

He did what was nigh as venturesome.

A quick, unwarned swerve of his pole, which bare gave Godefroy time to
take the cue, and our prow went scouring across the scud of whipping
currents where two rivers and an ocean-tide met.  The seething waves
lashed to foam with the long, low moan of the world-devouring serpent
which, legend says, is ever an-hungering to devour voyageurs on life's
sea.  And for all the world that reef of combing breakers was not unlike
a serpent type of malignant elements bent on man's destruction!

Then, to the amaze of us all, we had left the lower river.  The canoe was
cutting up-stream against a new current; and the moan of the pounding
surf receded to the rear.  Clouds blew inland, muffling the moon; and M.
Radisson ordered us ashore for the night.  Feet at a smouldering fire too
dull for an enemy to see and heads pillowed on logs, we bivouacked with
the frosty ground for bed.

"Bad beds make good risers," was all M. Radisson's comfort, when Godefroy
grumbled out some complaint.

A _hard_ master, you say?  A wise one, say I, for the forces he fought in
that desolate land were as adamant.  Only the man dauntless as adamant
could conquer.  And you must remember, while the diamond and the charcoal
are of the same family, 'tis the diamond has lustre, because it is
_hard_.  Faults, M. Radisson had, which were almost crimes; but look you
who judge him--his faults were not the faults of nearly all other men,
the faults which _are_ a crime--_the crime of being weak_!

The first thing our eyes lighted on when the sun rose in flaming darts
through the gray haze of dawn was a half-built fort on an island in
mid-river.  At the water side lay a queer-rigged brigantine, rocking to
the swell of the tide.  Here, then, was cause of that firing heard across
the marsh on the lower river.

"'Tis the pirate ship we saw on the high sea," muttered Godefroy, rubbing
his eyes.

"She flies no flag!  She has no license to trade!  She's a poacher!  She
will make a prize worth the taking," added M. Radisson sharply.  Then, as
if to justify that intent--"As _we_ have no license, we must either take
or be taken!"

The river mist gradually lifted, and there emerged from the fog a
stockaded fort with two bastions facing the river and guns protruding
from loopholes.

"Not so easy to take that fort," growled Godefroy, who was ever a
hanger-back.

"All the better," retorted M. de Radisson.  "Easy taking makes soft men!
'Twill test your mettle!"

"Test our mettle!" sulked the trader, a key higher in his obstinacy.
"All very well to talk, sir, but how can we take a fort mounted with
twenty cannon----"

"I'll tell you _the how_ when it's done," interrupted M. de Radisson.

But Godefroy was one of those obstinates who would be silent only when
stunned.

"I'd like to know, sir, what we're to do," he began.

"Godefroy, 'twould be waste time to knock sense in your pate!  There is
only one thing to do always--only one, _the right thing_!  Do it, fool!
An I hear more clack from you till it's done, I'll have your tongue out
with the nippers!"

Godefroy cowered sulkily back, and M. de Radisson laughed.

"That will quell him," said he.  "When Godefroy's tongue is out he can't
grumble, and grumbling is his bread of life!"

Stripping off his bright doublet, M. Radisson hung it from a tree to
attract the fort's notice.  Then he posted us in ambuscade with orders to
capture whatever came.

But nothing came.

And when the fort guns boomed out the noon hour M. Radisson sprang up all
impatience.

"I'll wait no man's time," he vowed.  "Losing time is losing the game!
Launch out!"

Chittering something about our throats being cut, Godefroy shrank back.
With a quick stride M. Radisson was towering above him.  Catching
Godefroy by the scruff of the neck, he threw him face down into the
canoe, muttering out it would be small loss if all the cowards in the
world had their throats cut.

"The pirates come to trade," he explained.  "They will not fire at
Indians.  Bind your hair back like that Indian there!"

No sooner were we in the range of the fort than M. Radisson uttered the
shrill call of a native, bade our Indian stand up, and himself enacted
the pantomime of a savage, waving his arms, whistling, and hallooing.
With cries of welcome, the fort people ran to the shore and left their
guns unmanned.  Reading from a syllable book, they shouted out Indian
words.  It was safe to approach.  Before they could arm we could escape.
But we were two men, one lad, and a neutral Indian against an armed
garrison in a land where killing was no murder.

M. de Radisson stood up and called in the Indian tongue.  They did not
understand.

"New to it," commented Radisson, "not the Hudson's Bay Company!"

All the while he was imperceptibly approaching nearer.  He shouted in
French.  They shook their heads.

"English highwaymen, blundered in here by chance," said he.

Tearing off the Indian head-band of disguise, he demanded in mighty
peremptory tones who they were.

"English," they called back doubtfully.

"What have you come for?" insisted Radisson, with a great swelling of his
chest.

"The beaver trade," came a faint voice.

Where had I heard it before?  Did it rise from the ground in the woods,
or from a far memory of children throwing a bully into the sea?

"I demand to see your license," boldly challenged Radisson.

At that the fellows ashore put their heads together.

"In the name of the king, I demand to see your license instantly,"
repeated Sieur de Radisson, with louder authority.

"We have no license," explained one of the men, who was dressed with
slashed boots, red doublet, and cocked hat.

M. Radisson smiled and poled a length closer.

"A ship without a license!  A prize-for the taking!  If the rascals
complain--the galleys for life!" and he laughed softly.

"This coast is possessed by the King of France," he shouted.  "We have a
strong garrison!  We mistook your firing for more French ships!"  Shaping
his hands trumpet fashion to his mouth, he called this out again, adding
that our Indian was of a nation in league with the French.

The pirates were dumb as if he had tossed a hand grenade among them.

"The ship is ours now, lads," said Radisson softly, poling nearer.  "See,
lads, the bottom has tumbled from their courage!  We'll not waste a pound
o' powder in capturing that prize!"  He turned suddenly to me--"As I live
by bread, 'tis that bragging young dandy-prat--hop-o'-my-thumb--Ben
Gillam of Boston Town!"

"Ben Gillam!"

I was thinking of my assailant in the woods.  "Ben was tall.  The pirate,
who came carving at me, was small."

But Ben Gillam it was, turned pirate or privateer--as you choose to call
it--grown to a well-timbered rapscallion with head high in air,
jack-boots half-way to his waist, a clanking sword at heel, and a nose
too red from rum.

As we landed, he sent his men scattering to the fort, and stood twirling
his mustaches till the recognition struck him.

"By Jericho--Radisson!" he gasped.

Then he tossed his chin defiantly in air like an unbroken colt disposed
to try odds with a master.

"Don't be afraid to land," he called down out of sheer impudence.

"Don't be afraid to have us land," Radisson shouted up to him.  "We'll
not harm you!"

Ben swore a big oath, fleered a laugh, and kicked the sand with his
heels.  Raising a hand, he signalled the watchers on the ship.

"Sorry to welcome you in this warlike fashion," said he.

"Glad to welcome you to the domain of His Most Christian Majesty, the
King of France," retorted Radisson, leaping ashore.

Ben blinked to catch the drift of that.

"Devil take their majesties!" he ejaculated.  "He's king who conquers!"

"No need to talk of conquering when one is master already," corrected M.
de Radisson.

"Shiver my soul," blurts out Ben, "I haven't a tongue like an eel, but
that's what I mean; and I'm king here, and welcome to you, Radisson!"

"And that's what I mean," laughed M. Radisson, with a bow, quietly
motioning us to follow ashore.  "No need to conquer where one is master,
and welcome to you, Captain Gillam!"

And they embraced each other like spider and fly, each with a free hand
to his sword-hilt, and a questioning look on the other's face.

Says M. Radisson: "I've seen that ship before!"

Ben laughs awkwardly.  "We captured her from a Dutchman," he begins.

"Oh!" says Sieur Radisson.  "I meant outside the straits after the storm!"

Gillam's eyes widen.  "Were those your ships?" he asks.  Then both men
laugh.

"Not much to boast in the way of a fleet," taunts Ben.

"Those are the two smallest we have," quickly explains Radisson.

Gillam's face went blank, and M. Radisson's eyes closed to the watchful
slit of a cat mouse-hunting.

"Come!  Come!" exclaims Ben, with a sudden flare of friendliness, "I am
no baby-eater!  Put a peg in that!  Shiver my soul if this is a way to
welcome friends!  Come aboard all of you and test the Canary we got in
the hold of a fine Spanish galleon last week!  Such a top-heavy ship,
with sails like a tinker's tatters, you never saw!  And her hold running
over with Canary and Madeira--oh!  Come aboard!  Come aboard!" he urged.

It was Pierre Radisson's turn to blink.

"And drink to the success of the beaver trade," importunes Ben.

'Twas as pretty a piece of play as you could see: Ben, scheming to get
the Frenchman captive; M. Radisson, with the lightnings under his brows
and that dare-devil rashness of his blood tempting him to spy out the
lad's strength.

"Ben was the body of the venture!  Where was the brain?  It was that took
me aboard his ship," M. Radisson afterward confessed to us.

"Come!  Come!" pressed Gillam.  "I know young Stanhope there"--his mighty
air brought the laugh to my face--"young Stanhope there has a taste for
fine Canary----"

"But, lad," protested Radisson, with a condescension that was vinegar to
Ben's vanity, "we cannot be debtors altogether.  Let two of your men stay
here and whiff pipes with my fellows, while I go aboard!"

Ben's teeth ground out an assent that sounded precious like an oath; for
he knew that he was being asked for hostages of safe-conduct while M.
Radisson spied out the ship.  He signalled, as we thought, for two
hostages to come down from the fort; but scarce had he dropped his hand
when fort and ship let out such a roar of cannonading as would have
lifted the hair from any other head than Pierre Radisson's.

Godefroy cut a caper.  The Indian's eyes bulged with terror, and my own
pulse went a-hop; but M. Radisson never changed countenance.

"Pardieu," says he softly, with a pleased smile as the last shot went
skipping over the water, "you're devilish fond o' fireworks, to waste
good powder so far from home!"

Ben mumbled out that he had plenty of powder, and that some fools didn't
know fireworks from war.

M. Radisson said he was glad there was plenty of powder, there would
doubtless be use found for it, and he knew fools oft mistook fireworks
for war.

With that a cannon-shot sent the sand spattering to our boots and filled
the air with powder-dust; but when the smoke cleared, M. Radisson had
quietly put himself between Ben and the fort.

Drawing out his sword, the Frenchman ran his finger up the edge.

"Sharp as the next," said he.

Lowering the point, he scratched a line on the sand between the mark of
the last shot and us.

"How close can your gunners hit, Ben?" asked Radisson.  "Now I'll wager
you a bottle of Madeira they can't hit that line without hitting you!"

Ben's hand went up quick enough.  The gunners ceased firing and M.
Radisson sheathed his sword with a laugh.

"You'll not take the odds?  Take advice instead!  Take a man's advice,
and never waste powder!  You'll need it all if he's king who conquers!
Besides," he added, turning suddenly serious, "if my forces learn you are
here I'll not promise I've strength to restrain them!"

"How many have you?" blurted Ben.

"Plenty to spare!  Now, if you are afraid of the Hudson's Bay Company
ships attacking you, I'd be glad to loan you enough young fire-eaters to
garrison the fort here!"

"Thanks," says Ben, twirling his mustaches till they were nigh jerked
out, "but how long would they stay?"

"Till you sent them away," says M. de Radisson, with the lights at play
under his brows.

"Hang me if I know how long that would be," laughed Gillam, half-puzzled,
half-pleased with the Frenchman's darting wits.

"Ben," begins M. Radisson, tapping the lace ruffle of Gillam's sleeve,
"you must not fire those guns!"

"No?" questions Gillam.

"My officers are swashing young blades!  What with the marines and the
common soldiers and my own guard, 'tis all I can manage to keep the
rascals in hand!  They must not know you are here!"

Gillam muttered something of a treaty of truce for the winter.

M. Radisson shook his head.

"I have scarce the support to do as I will," he protests.

Young Gillam swore such coolness was scurvy treatment for an old friend.

"Old friend," laughed Radisson afterward.  "Did the cub's hangdog of a
father not offer a thousand pounds for my head on the end of a pikestaff?"

But with Ben he played the game out.

"The season is too far advanced for you to _escape_," says he with soft
emphasis.

"'Tis why I want a treaty," answers the sailor.

"Come, then," laughs the Frenchman, "now--as to terms----"

"Name them," says Gillam.

"If you don't wish to be discovered----"

"I don't wish to be discovered!"

"If you don't wish to be discovered don't run up a flag!"

"One," says Gillam.

"If you don't wish to be discovered, don't let your people leave the
island!"

"They haven't," says Gillam.

"What?" asks M. Radisson, glancing sharply at me; for we were both
thinking of that night attack.

"They haven't left the island," repeats Gillam.

"Ten lies are as cheap as two," says Radisson to us.  Then to Gillam,
"Don't let your people leave the island, or they'll meet my forces."

"Two," says Gillam.

"If you don't wish the Fur Company to discover you, don't fire guns!"

"Three," says Gillam.

"That is to keep 'em from connecting with those inlanders," whispered
Godefroy, who knew the plays of his master's game better than I.  "We can
beat 'em single; but if Ben joins the inlanders and the Fur Company
against us----"

Godefroy completed his prophecy with an ominous shake of the head.

"My men shall not know you are here," M. Radisson was promising.

"One," counts Gillam.

"I'll join with you against the English ships!"

Young Gillam laughed derisively.

"My father commands the Hudson's Bay ship," says he.

"Egad, yes!" retorts M. Radisson nonchalantly, "but your father doesn't
command the governor of the Fur Company, who sailed out in his ship."

"The governor does not know that I am here," flouts Ben.

"But he would know if I told him," adds M. de Radisson, "and if I told
him the Company's captain owned half the ship poaching on the Company's
preserve, the Company's captain and the captain's son might go hang for
all the furs they'd get!  By the Lord, youngster, I rather suspect both
the captain and the captain's son would be whipped and hanged for the
theft!"

Ben gave a start and looked hard at Radisson.  'Twas the first time, I
think, the cub realized that the pawn in so soft-spoken a game was his
own neck.

"Go on," he said, with haste and fear in his look.  "I promised three
terms.  You will keep your people from knowing I am here and join me
against the English--go on!  What next?"

"I'll defend you against the Indians," coolly capped M. Radisson.

Godefroy whispered in my ear that he would not give a pin's purchase for
all the furs the New Englander would get; and Ben Gillam looked like a
man whose shoe pinches.  He hung his head hesitating.

"But if you run up a flag, or fire a gun, or let your people leave the
island," warned M. Radisson, "I may let my men come, or tell the English,
or join the Indians against you."

Gillam put out his hand.

"It's a treaty," said he.

There and then he would have been glad to see the last of us; but M.
Radisson was not the man to miss the chance of seeing a rival's ship.

"How about that Canary taken from the foreign ship?  A galleon, did you
say, tall and slim?  Did you sink her or sell her?  Send down your men to
my fellows!  Let us go aboard for the story."




CHAPTER XI

MORE OF M. RADISSON'S RIVALS

So Ben Gillam must take M. Radisson aboard the Susan, or Garden, as she
was called when she sailed different colours, the young fellow with a
wry face, the Frenchman, all gaiety.  As the two leaders mounted the
companion-ladder, hostages came towards the beach to join us.  I had
scarce noticed them when one tugged at my sleeve, and I turned to look
full in the faithful shy face of little Jack Battle.

"Jack!" I shouted, but he only wrung and wrung and wrung at my hand,
emitting little gurgling laughs.

Then we linked arms and walked along the beach, where others could not
hear.

"Where did you come from?" I demanded.

"Master Ben fished me up on the Grand Banks.  I was with the fleet.  It
was after he met you off the straits; and here I be, Ramsay."

"After he met us off the straits."  I was trying to piece some
connection between Gillam's ship and the inland assailants.  "Jack,
tell me!  How many days have you been here?"

"Three," says Jack.  "Split me fore and aft if we've been a day more!"

It was four since that night in the bush.

"You could not build a fort in three days!"

"'Twas half-built when we came."

"Who did that?  Is Captain Gillam stealing the Company's furs for Ben?"

"No-o-o," drawled Jack thoughtfully, "it aren't that.  It are something
else, I can't make out.  Master Ben keeps firing and firing and firing
his guns expecting some one to answer."

"The Indians with the pelts," I suggested.

"No-o-o," answered Jack.  "Split me fore and aft if it's Indians he
wants!  He could send up river for them.  It's some one as came from
his father's ship outside Boston when Master Ben sailed for the north
and Captain Gillam was agoing home to England with Mistress Hortense in
his ship.  When no answer comes to our firing, Master Ben takes to
climbing the masthead and yelling like a fog-horn and dropping curses
like hail and swearing he'll shoot him as fails to keep appointment as
he'd shoot a dog, if he has to track him inland a thousand leagues.
Split me fore and aft if he don't!"

"Who shoot what?" I demanded, trying to extract some meaning from the
jumbled narrative.

"That's what I don't know," says Jack.

I fetched a sigh of despair.

"What's the matter with your hand?  Does it hurt?" he asked quickly.

Poor Jack!  I looked into his faithful blue eyes.  There was not a
shadow of deception there--only the affection that gives without
wishing to comprehend.  Should I tell him of the adventure?  But a loud
halloo from Godefroy notified me that M. de Radisson was on the beach
ready to launch.

"Almost waste work to go on fortifying," he was warning Ben.

"You forget the danger from your own crews," pleaded young Gillam.

"Pardieu!  We can easily arrange that.  I promise you never to approach
with more than thirty of a guard."  (We were twenty-nine all told.)
"But remember, don't hoist a flag, don't fire, don't let your people
leave the island."

Then we launched out, and I heard Ben muttering under his breath that
he was cursed if he had ever known such impudence.  In mid-current our
leader laid his pole crosswise and laughed long.

"'Tis a pretty prize.  'Twill fetch the price of a thousand
beaver-skins!  Captain Gillam reckoned short when he furnished young
Ben to defraud the Company.  He would give a thousand pounds for my
head--would he?  Pardieu!  He shall give five thousand pounds and leave
my head where it is!  And egad, if he behaves too badly, he shall pay
hush-money, or the governor shall know!  When we've taken him, lads,
who--think you--dare complain?"  And he laughed again; but at a bend in
the river he turned suddenly with his eyes snapping--"Who a' deuce
could that have been playing pranks in the woods the other night?  Mark
my words, Stanhope, whoever 'twas will prove the brains and the
mainspring and the driving-wheel and the rudder of this cub's venture!"

And he began to dip in quick vigorous strokes like the thoughts
ferreting through his brain.  We had made bare a dozen miles when
paddles clapped athwart as if petrified.

Up the wide river, like a great white bird, came a stately ship.  It
was the Prince Rupert of the Hudson's Bay Company, which claimed sole
right to trade in all that north land.

Young Gillam, with guns mounted, to the rear!  A hostile ship, with
fighting men and ordnance, to the fore!  An unknown enemy inland!  And
for our leader a man on whose head England and New England set a price!

Do you wonder that our hearts stopped almost as suddenly as the
paddles?  But it was not fear that gave pause to M. Radisson.

"If those ships get together, the game is lost," says he hurriedly.
"May the devil fly away with us, if we haven't wit to stop that ship!"

Act jumping with thought, he shot the canoe under cover of the wooded
shore.  In a twinkling we had such a fire roaring as the natives use
for signals.  Between the fire and the river he stationed our Indian,
as hunters place a decoy.

The ruse succeeded.

Lowering sail, the Prince Rupert cast anchor opposite our fire; but
darkness had gathered, and the English sent no boat ashore till morning.

Posting us against the woods, M. Radisson went forward alone to meet
the company of soldiers rowing ashore.  The man standing amidships,
Godefroy said, was Captain Gillam, Ben's father; but the gentleman with
gold-laced doublet and ruffled sleeves sitting back in the sheets was
Governor Brigdar, of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company, a courtier of Prince
Rupert's choice.

The clumsy boat grounded in the shallows, and a soldier got both feet
in the water to wade.  Instantly M. Radisson roared out such a
stentorian "Halt!" you would have thought that he had an army at his
back.  Indeed, that is what the party thought, for the fellow got his
feet back in the boat monstrous quick.  And there was a vast bandying
of words, each asking other who they were, and bidding each other in no
very polite terms to mind their own affairs.

Of a sudden M. Radisson wheeled to us standing guard.

"Officers," he shouted, "first brigade!--forward!"

From the manner of him we might have had an army under cover behind
that bush.

All at once Governor Brigdar's lace handkerchief was aflutter at the
end of a sword, and the representative of King Charles begged leave to
land and salute the representative of His Most Christian Majesty, the
King of France.

And land they did, pompously peaceful, though their swords clanked so
oft every man must have had a hand ready at his baldrick, Pierre
Radisson receiving them with the lofty air of a gracious monarch, the
others bowing and unhatting and bending and crooking their spines
supple as courtiers with a king.

Presently came the soldiers back to us as hostages, while Radisson
stepped into the boat to go aboard the Prince Rupert with the captain
and governor.  Godefroy called out against such rashness, and Pierre
Radisson shouted back that threat about the nippers pulling the end off
the fellow's tongue.

Serving under the French flag, I was not supposed to know English; but
when one soldier said he had seen "Mr. What-d'y-call-'im before,"
pointing at me, I recognised the mate from whom I had hired passage to
England for M. Picot on Captain Gillam's ship.

"Like enough," says the other, "'tis a land where no man brings his
back history."

"See here, fellow," said I, whipping out a crown, "here's for you to
tell me of the New Amsterdam gentleman who sailed from Boston last
spring!"

"No New Amsterdam gentleman sailed from Boston," answered both in one
breath.

"I am not paying for lies," and I returned the crown to my pocket.

Then Radisson came back, urging Captain Gillam against proceeding up
the river.

"The Prince Rupert might ground on the shallows," he warned.

"That will keep them apart till we trap one or both," he told us, as we
set off in our canoe.  But we had not gone out of range before we were
ordered ashore.  Picking our way back overland, we spied through the
bush for two days, till we saw that Governor Brigdar was taking
Radisson's advice, going no farther up-stream, but erecting a fort on
the shore where he had anchored.

"And now," said Radisson, "we must act."

While we were spying through the woods, watching the English build
their fort, I thought that I saw a figure flitting through the bush to
the rear.  I dared not fire.  One shot would have betrayed us to the
English.  But I pointed my gun.  The thing came gliding noiselessly
nearer.  I clicked the gun-butt without firing.  The thing paused.
Then I called M. Radisson, who said it was Le Borgne, the wall-eyed
Indian.  Godefroy vowed 'twas a spy from Ben Gillam's fort.  The Indian
mumbled some superstition of a manitou.  To me it seemed like a
caribou; for it faded to nothing the way those fleet creatures have of
skimming into distance.




CHAPTER XII

M. RADISSON BEGINS THE GAME

M. Radisson had reckoned well.  His warning to prepare for instant
siege set all the young fire-eaters of our Habitation working like
beavers to complete the French fort.  The marquis took a hand at
squaring timbers shoulder to shoulder with Allemand, the pilot; and La
Chesnaye, the merchant prince, forgot to strut while digging up
earthworks for a parapet.  The leaven of the New World was working.
Honour was for him only whose brawn won the place; and our young
fellows of the birth and the pride were keenest to gird for the task.
On our return from the upper river to the fort, the palisaded walls
were finished, guns were mounted on all bastions, the two ships beached
under shelter of cannon, sentinels on parade at the main gate, and a
long barracks built mid-way across the courtyard.

Here we passed many a merry hour of a long winter night, the green
timbers cracking like pistol-shots to the tightening frost-grip, and
the hearth logs at each end of the long, low-raftered hall sending up a
roar that set the red shadows dancing among ceiling joists.  After
ward-room mess, with fare that kings might have envied--teal and
partridge and venison and a steak of beaver's tail, and moose nose as
an _entrée_, with a tidbit of buffalo hump that melted in your mouth
like flakes--the commonalty, as La Chesnaye designated those who sat
below the salt, would draw off to the far hearth.  Here the sailors
gathered close, spinning yarns, cracking jokes, popping corn, and
toasting wits, a-merrier far that your kitchen cuddies of older lands.
At the other hearth sat M. de Radisson, feet spread to the fire, a long
pipe between his lips, and an audience of young blades eager for his
tales.

"D'ye mind how we got away from the Iroquois, Chouart?" Radisson asks
Groseillers, who sits in a chair rough-hewn from a stump on the other
side of the fire.

Chouart Groseillers smiles quietly and strokes his black beard.  Jean
stretches across a bear-skin on the floor and shouts out, "Tell us!
Tell us!"

"We had been captives six months.  The Iroquois were beginning to let
us wander about alone.  Chouart there had sewed his thumb up, where an
old squaw had hacked at it with a dull shell.  The padre's nails, which
the Indians tore off in torture, had grown well enough for him to
handle a gun.  One day we were allowed out to hunt.  Chouart brought
down three deer, the padre two moose, and I a couple of bear.  That
night the warriors came back from a raid on Orange with not a thing to
eat but one miserable, little, thin, squealing pig.  Pardieu! men,
'twas our chance; and the chance is always hiding round a corner for
the man who goes ahead."

Radisson paused to whiff his pipe, all the lights in his eyes laughing
and his mouth expressionless as steel.

"'Tis an insult among Iroquois to leave food at a feast.  There were we
with food enough to stuff the tribe torpid as winter toads.  The padre
was sent round to the lodges with a tom-tom to beat every soul to the
feast.  Chouart and a Dutch prisoner and I cooked like kings' scullions
for four mortal hours!--"

"We wanted to delay the feast till midnight," explains Groseillers.

"And at midnight in trooped every man, woman, and brat of the
encampment.  The padre takes a tom-tom and stands at one end of the
lodge beating a very knave of a rub-a-dub and shouting at the top of
his voice: 'Eat, brothers, eat!  Bulge the eye, swell the coat, loose
the belt!  Eat, brothers, eat!'  Chouart stands at the boiler ladling
out joints faster than an army could gobble.  Within an hour every brat
lay stretched and the women were snoring asleep where they crouched.
From the warriors, here a grunt, there a groan!  But Chouart keeps
ladling out the meat.  Then the Dutchman grabs up a drum at the other
end of the lodge, and begins to beat and yell: 'Stuff, brudders, stuff!
Vat de gut zperets zend, gast not out!  Eat, braves, eat!'  And the
padre cuts the capers of a fiend on coals.  Still the warriors eat!
Still the drums beat!  Still the meat is heaped!  Then, one brave bowls
over asleep with his head on his knees!  Another warrior tumbles back!
Guards sit bolt upright sound asleep as a stone!"

"What did you put in the meat, Pierre?" asked Groseillers absently.

Radisson laughed.

"Do you mind, Chouart," he asked, "how the padre wanted to put poison
in the meat, and the Dutchman wouldn't let him?  Then the Dutchman
wanted to murder them all in their sleep, and the padre wouldn't let
him?"

Both men laughed.

"And the end?" asked Jean.

"We tied the squealing pig at the door for sentinel, broke ice with our
muskets, launched the canoe, and never stopped paddling till we reached
Three Rivers." [1]

At that comes a loud sally of laughter from the sailors at the far end
of the hall.  Godefroy, the English trader, is singing a rhyme of All
Souls' Day, and Allemand, the French pilot, protests.

  "Soul!  Soul!  For a soul-cake!
  One for Peter, two for Paul,
  Three for----."

But La Chesnaye shouts out for the knaves to hold quiet.  Godefroy bobs
his tipstaff, and bawls on:

  "Soul!  Soul!  For an apple or two!
  If you've got no apples, nuts will do!
  Out with your raisins, down with your gin!
  Give me plenty and I'll begin."

M. Radisson looks down the hall and laughs.  "By the saints," says he
softly, "a man loses the Christian calendar in this land!  'Tis All
Souls' Night!  Give the men a treat, La Chesnaye."

But La Chesnaye, being governor, must needs show his authority, and
vows to flog the knave for impudence.  Turning over benches in his
haste, the merchant falls on Godefroy with such largesse of cuffs that
the fellow is glad to keep peace.

The door blows open, and with a gust of wind a silent figure blows in.
'Tis Le Borgne, the one-eyed, who has taken to joining our men of a
merry night, which M. de Radisson encourages; for he would have all the
Indians come freely.

"Ha!" says Radisson, "I thought 'twas the men I sent to spy if the
marsh were safe crossing.  Give Le Borgne tobacco, La Chesnaye.  If
once the fellow gets drunk," he adds to me in an undertone, "that
silent tongue of his may wag on the interlopers.  We must be stirring,
stirring, Ramsay!  Ten days past!  Egad, a man might as well be a
fish-worm burrowing underground as such a snail!  We must stir--stir!
See here"--drawing me to the table apart from the others--"here we are
on the lower river," and he marked the letter X on a line indicating
the flow of our river to the bay.  "Here is the upper river," and he
drew another river meeting ours at a sharp angle.  "Here is Governor
Brigdar of the Hudson's Bay Company," marking another X on the upper
river.  "Here is Ben Gillam!  We are half-way between them on the
south.  I sent two men to see if the marsh between the rivers is fit
crossing."

[Illustration: Radisson's map.]

"Fit crossing?"

"When 'tis safe, we might plan a surprise.  The only doubt is how many
of those pirates are there who attacked you in the woods?"

And he sat back whiffing his pipe and gazing in space.  By this, La
Chesnaye had distributed so generous a treat that half the sailors were
roaring out hilarious mirth.  Godefroy astride a bench played big drum
on the wrong-end-up of the cook's dish-pan.  Allemand attempted to
fiddle a poker across the tongs.  Voyageurs tried to shoot the big
canoe over a waterfall; for when Jean tilted one end of the long bench,
they landed as cleanly on the floor as if their craft had plunged.  But
the copper-faced Le Borgne remained taciturn and tongue-tied.

"Be curse to that wall-eyed knave," muttered Radisson.  "He's too deep
a man to let go!  We must capture him or win him!"

"Perhaps when he becomes more friendly we may track him back to the
inlanders," I suggested.

M. de Radisson closed one eye and looked at me attentively.

"La Chesnaye," he called, "treat that fellow like a king!"

And the rafters rang so loud with the merriment that we none of us
noticed the door flung open, nor saw two figures stamping off the snow
till they had thrown a third man bound at M. de Radisson's feet.  The
messengers sent to spy out the marsh had returned with a half-frozen
prisoner.

"We found him where the ice is soft.  He was half dead," explained one
scout.

Silence fell.  Through the half-dark the Indian glided towards the
door.  The unconscious prisoner lay face down.

"Turn him over," ordered Radisson.

As our men rolled him roughly over, the captive uttered a heavy groan.
His arms fell away from his face revealing little Jack Battle, the
castaway, in a haven as strange as of old.

"Search him before he wakes," commanded Radisson roughly.

"Let me," I asked.

In the pouches of the caribou coat was only pemmican; but my hand
crushed against a softness in the inner waistcoat.  I pulled it out--a
little, old glove, the colour Hortense had dangled the day that Ben
Gillam fell into the sea.

"Pish!" says Radisson.  "Anything else?"

There crumpled out a yellow paper.  M. Radisson snatched it up.

"Pish!" says he, "nothing--put it back!"

It was a page of my copy-book, when I used to take lessons with
Rebecca.  Replacing paper and glove, I closed up the sailor lad's coat.

"Search his cap and moccasins!"

I was mighty thankful, as you may guess, that other hands than mine
found the tell-tale missive--a badly writ letter addressed to "Captain
Zechariah Gillium."

Tearing it open, M. Radisson read with stormy lights agleam in his eyes.

"Sir, this sailor lad is an old comrade," I pleaded.

"Then'a God's name take care of him," he flashed out.

But long before I had Jack Battle thawed back to consciousness in my
own quarters, Jean came running with orders for me to report to M.
Radisson.

"I'll take care of the sailor for you," proffered Jean.

And I hastened to the main hall.

"Get ready," ordered Radisson.  "We must stir!  That young
hop-o'-my-thumb suspects his father has arrived.  He has sent this
fellow with word of me.  Things will be doing.  We must stir--we must
stir.  Read those for news," and he handed me the letter.

The letter was addressed to Ben's father, of the Hudson's Bay ship,
Prince Rupert.  In writing which was scarcely legible, it ran:


  I take Up my Pen to lett You knowe that cutt-throte
  french viper Who deserted You at ye fort of ye bay 10 Years
  ago hath come here for France Threatening us.

  he Must Be Stopped.  Will i Do It?

  have Bin Here Come Six weekes All Souls' day and Not
  Heard a Word of Him that went inland to Catch ye Furs
  from ye Savages before they Mett Governor B----.  If He
  Proves False----


There the crushed missive was torn, but the purport was plain.  Ben
Gillam and his father were in collusion with the inland pirates to get
peltries from the Indians before Governor Brigdar came; and the
inlanders, whoever they were, had concealed both themselves and the
furs.  I handed the paper back to M. Radisson.

"We must stir, lad--we must stir," he repeated.

"But the marsh is soft yet.  It is unsafe to cross."

"The river is not frozen in mid-current," retorted M. Radisson
impatiently.  "Get ready!  I am taking different men to impress the
young spark with our numbers--you and La Chesnaye and the marquis and
Allemand.  But where a' devil is that Indian?"

Le Borgne had slipped away.

"Is he a spy?" I asked.

"Get ready!  Why do you ask questions?  The thing is--to
do!--do!!--do--!!!"

But Allemand, who had been hauling out the big canoe, came up sullenly.

"Sir," he complained, "the river's running ice the size of a raft, and
the wind's a-blowing a gale."

"Man," retorted M. de Radisson with the quiet precision of steel, "if
the river were running live fire and the gale blew from the inferno,
I--would--go!  Stay home and go to bed, Allemand."  And he chose one of
the common sailors instead.

And when we walked out to the thick edge of the shore-ice and launched
the canoe among a whirling drift of ice-pans, we had small hope of ever
seeing Fort Bourbon again.  The ice had not the thickness of the spring
jam, but it was sharp enough to cut our canoe, and we poled our way far
oftener than we paddled.  Where the currents of the two rivers joined,
the wind had whipped the waters to a maelstrom.  The night was
moonless.  It was well we did not see the white turmoil, else M.
Radisson had had a mutiny on his hands.  When the canoe leaped to the
throb of the sucking currents like a cataract to the plunge, La
Chesnaye clapped his pole athwart and called out a curse on such
rashness.  M. Radisson did not hear or did not heed.  An ice-pan
pitched against La Chesnaye's place, and the merchant must needs thrust
out to save himself.

The only light was the white glare of ice.  The only guide across that
heaving traverse, the unerring instinct of that tall figure at the bow,
now plunging forward, now bracing back, now shouting out a "Steady!"
that the wind carried to our ears, thrusting his pole to right, to left
in lightning strokes, till the canoe suddenly darted up the roaring
current of the north river.

Here we could no longer stem both wind and tide.  M. Radisson ordered
us ashore for rest.  Fourteen days were we paddling, portaging,
struggling up the north river before we came in range of the Hudson's
Bay fort built by Governor Brigdar.

Our proximity was heralded by a low laugh from M. de Radisson.  "Look,"
said he, "their ship aground in mud a mile from the fort.  In case of
attack, their forces will be divided.  It is well," said M. Radisson.

The Prince Rupert lay high on the shallows, fast bound in the freezing
sands.  Hiding our canoe in the woods, we came within hail and called.
There was no answer.

"Drunk or scurvy," commented M. Radisson.  "An faith, Ramsay, 'twould
be an easy capture if we had big enough fort to hold them all!"

Shaping his hands to a trumpet, he shouted, "How are you, there?"

As we were turning away a fellow came scrambling up the fo'castle and
called back: "A little better, but all asleep."

"A good time for us to examine the fort," said M. de Radisson.

Aloud, he answered that he would not disturb the crew, and he wheeled
us off through the woods.

"See!" he observed, as we emerged in full view of the stockaded fur
post, "palisades nailed on from the inside--easily pushed loose from
the outside.  Pish!--low enough for a dog to jump."

Posting us in ambush, he advanced to the main edifice behind the
wide-open gate.  I saw him shaking hands with the Governor of the
Hudson's Bay Company, who seemed on the point of sallying out to hunt.

Then he signalled for us to come.  I had almost concluded he meant to
capture Governor Brigdar on the spot; but Pierre Radisson ever took
friends and foes unawares.

"Your Excellency," says he, with the bow of a courtier, "this is
Captain Gingras of our new ship."

Before I had gathered my wits, Governor Brigdar was shaking hands.

"And this," continued Radisson, motioning forward the common sailor too
quick for surprise to betray us, "this, Your Excellency, is Colonel
Bienville of our marines."

Colonel Bienville, being but a lubberly fellow, nigh choked with
amazement at the English governor's warmth; but before we knew our
leader's drift, the marquis and La Chesnaye were each in turn presented
as commanders of our different land forces.

"'Tis the misfortune of my staff not to speak English," explains Pierre
Radisson suavely with another bow, which effectually shut any of our
mouths that might have betrayed him.

"Doubtless your officers know Canary better than English," returns
Governor Brigdar; and he would have us all in to drink healths.

"Keep your foot in the open door," Pierre Radisson whispered as we
passed into the house.

Then we drank the health of the King of England, firing our muskets
into the roof; and drank to His Most Christian Majesty of France with
another volley; and drank to the confusion of our common enemies, with
a clanking of gun-butts that might have alarmed the dead.  Upon which
Pierre Radisson protested that he would not keep Governor Brigdar from
the hunt; and we took our departure.

"And now," said he, hastening through the bush, "as no one took fright
at all that firing, what's to hinder examining the ship?"

"Pardieu, Ramsay," he remarked, placing us in ambush again, "an we had
a big enough fort, with food to keep them alive, we might have bagged
them all."

From which I hold that M. Radisson was not so black a man as he has
been painted; for he could have captured the English as they lay weak
of the scurvy and done to them, for the saving of fort rations, what
rivals did to all foes--shot them in a land which tells no secrets.

From our place on the shore we saw him scramble to the deck.  A man in
red nightcap rushed forward with an oath.

"And what might you want, stealing up like a thief in the night?"
roared the man.

"To offer my services, Captain Gillam," retorted Radisson with a hand
to his sword-hilt and both feet planted firm on the deck.

"Services?" bawled Gillam.

"Services for your crew, captain," interrupted Radisson softly.

"Hm!" retorted Captain Gillam, pulling fiercely at his grizzled beard.
"Then you might send a dozen brace o' partridges, some oil, and
candles."

With that they fell to talking in lower tones; and M. Radisson came
away with quiet, unspoken mirth in his eyes, leaving Captain Gillam in
better mood.

"Curse me if he doesn't make those partridges an excuse to go back
soon," exclaimed La Chesnaye.  "The ship would be of some value; but
why take the men prisoners?  Much better shoot them down as they would
us, an they had the chance!"

"La Chesnaye!" uttered a sharp voice.  Radisson had heard.  "There are
two things I don't excuse a fool for--not minding his own business and
not holding his tongue."

And though La Chesnaye's money paid for the enterprise, he held his
tongue mighty still.  Indeed, I think if any tongue had wagged twice in
Radisson's hearing he would have torn the offending member out.  Doing
as we were bid without question, we all filed down to the canoe.  Less
ice cumbered the upper current, and by the next day we were opposite
Ben Gillam's New England fort.

"La Chesnaye and Forêt will shoot partridges," commanded M. de
Radisson.  Leaving them on the far side of the river, he bade the
sailor and me paddle him across to young Gillam's island.

What was our surprise to see every bastion mounted with heavy guns and
the walls full manned.  We took the precaution of landing under shelter
of the ship and fired a musket to call out sentinels.  Down ran Ben
Gillam and a second officer, armed cap-a-pie, with swaggering insolence
that they took no pains to conceal.

"Congratulate you on coming in the nick of time," cried Ben.

"Now what in the Old Nick does he mean by that?" said Radisson.  "Does
the cub think to cower me with his threats?"

"I trust your welcome includes my four officers," he responded.  "Two
are with me and two have gone for partridges."

Ben bellowed a jeering laugh, and his second man took the cue.

"Your four officers may be forty devils," yelled the lieutenant; "we've
finished our fort.  Come in, Monsieur Radisson!  Two can play at the
game of big talk!  You're welcome in if you leave your forty officers
out!"

For the space of a second M. Radisson's eyes swept the cannon pointing
from the bastion embrasures.  We were safe enough.  The full hull of
their own ship was between the guns and us.

"Young man," said M. Radisson, addressing Ben, "you may speak less
haughtily, as I come in friendship."

"Friendship!" flouted Ben, twirling his mustache and showing both rows
of teeth.  "Pooh, pooh, M. Radisson!  You are not talking to a
stripling!"

"I had thought I was--and a very fool of a booby, too," answered M.
Radisson coolly.

"Sir!" roared young Gillam with a rumbling of oaths, and he fumbled his
sword.

But his sword had not left the scabbard before M. de Radisson sent it
spinning through mid-air into the sea.

"I must ask your forgiveness for that, boy," said the Frenchman to Ben,
"but a gentleman fights only his equals."

Ben Gillam went white and red by turns, his nose flushing and paling
like the wattle of an angry turkey; and he stammered out that he hoped
M. de Radisson did not take umbrage at the building of a fort.

"We must protect ourselves from the English," pleaded Ben.

"Pardieu, yes," agreed M. de Radisson, proffering his own sword with a
gesture in place of the one that had gone into the sea, "and I had come
to offer you twenty men _to hold_ the fort!"

Ben glanced questioningly to his second officer.

"Bid that fellow draw off!" ordered M. Radisson.

Dazed like a man struck between the eyes, Ben did as he was commanded.

"I told you that I came in friendship," began Radisson.

Gillam waited.

"Have you lost a man, Ben?"

"No," boldly lied Gillam.

"Has one run away from the island against orders?"

"No, devil take me, if I've lost a hand but the supercargo that I
killed."

"I had thought that was yours," said Radisson, with contempt for the
ruffian's boast; and he handed out the paper taken from Jack.

Ben staggered back with a great oath, vowing he would have the scalp of
the traitor who lost that letter.  Both stood silent, each
contemplating the other.  Then M. Radisson spoke.

"Ben," said he, never taking his glance from the young fellow's face,
"what will you give me if I guide you to your father this afternoon?  I
have just come from Captain Gillam.  He and his crew are ill of the
scurvy.  Dress as a coureur and I pass you for a Frenchman."

"My father!" cried Ben with his jaws agape and his wits at sea.

"Pardieu--yes, I said your father!"

"What do you want in return?" stammered Ben.

Radisson uttered a laugh that had the sound of sword-play.

"Egad, 'tis a hot supper I'd like better than anything else just now!
If you feed us well and disguise yourself as a coureur, I'll take you
at sundown!"

And in spite of his second officer's signals, Ben Gillam hailed us
forthwith to the fort, where M. Radisson's keen eyes took in every
feature of door and gate and sally-port and gun.  While the cook was
preparing our supper and Ben disguising as a French wood-runner, we
wandered at will, M. Radisson all the while uttering low laughs and
words as of thoughts.

It was--"Caught--neat as a mouse in a trap!  Don't let him spill the
canoe when we're running the traverse, Ramsay!  May the fiends blast La
Chesnaye if he opens his foolish mouth in Gillam's hearing!  Where,
think you, may we best secure him?  Are the timbers of your room sound?"

Or else--"Faith, a stout timber would hold those main gates open!
Egad, now, an a man were standing in this doorway, he might jam a
musket in the hinge so the thing would keep open!  Those guns in the
bastions though--think you those cannon are not pushed too far through
the windows to be slued round quickly?"

And much more to the same purpose, which told why M. Radisson stooped
to beg supper from rivals.

At sundown all was ready for departure.  La Chesnaye and the marquis
had come back with the partridges that were to make pretence for our
quick return to the Prince Rupert.  Ben Gillam had disguised as a
bush-runner, and the canoe lay ready to launch.  Fools and children
unconsciously do wise things by mistake, as you know; and 'twas such an
unwitting act sprung M. Radisson's plans and let the prize out of the
trap.

"Sink me an you didn't promise the loan of twenty men to hold the
fort!" exclaimed Ben, stepping down.

"Twenty--and more--and welcome," cried Radisson eagerly.

"Then send Ramsay and Monsieur La Chesnaye back," put in Ben quickly.
"I like not the fort without one head while I'm away."

"Willingly," and M. Radisson's eyes glinted triumph.

"Hold a minute!" cried Ben before sitting down.  "The river is rough.
Let two of my men take their places in the canoe!"

M. Radisson's breath drew sharp through his teeth.  But the trap was
sprung, and he yielded gracefully enough to hide design.

"A curse on the blundering cub!" he muttered, drawing apart to give me
instructions.  "Pardieu--you must profit on this, Ramsay!  Keep your
eyes open.  Spoil a door-lock or two!  Plug the cannon if you can!  Mix
sand with their powder!  Shift the sentinels!  Get the devils
insubordinate----"


"M. Radisson!" shouted Gillam.

"Coming!" says Radisson; and he went off with his teeth gritting sand.


[1] See Radisson's own account.




CHAPTER XIII

THE WHITE DARKNESS

How much of those instructions we carried out I leave untold.
Certainly we could not have been less grateful as guests than Ben
Gillam's men were inhospitable as hosts.  A more sottish crew of rakes
you never saw.  'Twas gin in the morning and rum in the afternoon and
vile potions of mixed poisons half the night, with a cracking of the
cook's head for withholding fresh kegs and a continual scuffle of
fighters over cheating at cards.  No marvel the second officer flogged
and carved at the knaves like an African slaver.  The first night the
whole crew set on us with drawn swords because we refused to gamble the
doublets from our backs.  La Chesnaye laid about with his sword and I
with my rapier, till the cook rushed to our rescue with a kettle of
lye.  After that we escaped to the deck of the ship and locked
ourselves inside Ben Gillam's cabin.  Here we heard the weather-vanes
of the fort bastions creaking for three days to the shift of fickle
winds.  Shore-ice grew thicker and stretched farther to mid-current.
Mock suns, or sun-dogs, as we called them, oft hung on each side of the
sun.  La Chesnaye said these boded ill weather.

Sea-birds caught the first breath of storm and wheeled landward with
shrill calls, and once La Chesnaye and I made out through the ship's
glass a vast herd of caribou running to sniff the gale from the crest
of an inland hill.

"If Radisson comes not back soon we are storm-bound here for the
winter.  As you live, we are," grumbled the merchant.

But prompt as the ring of a bell to the clapper came Pierre Radisson on
the third day, well pleased with what he had done and alert to keep two
of us outside the fort in spite of Ben's urgings to bring the French in
for refreshments.

The wind was shifting in a way that portended a nor'easter, and the
weather would presently be too inclement for us to remain outside.
That hastened M. Radisson's departure, though sun-dogs and the long,
shrill whistling of contrary winds foretold what was brewing.

"Sink me, after such kindness, I'll see you part way home!  By the Lord
Harry, I will!" swore Ben.

M. Radisson screwed his eyes nigh shut and protested he could not
permit young Captain Gillam to take such trouble.

"The young villain," mutters La Chesnaye, "he wants to spy which way we
go."

"Come!  Come!" cries Ben.  "If you say another word I go all the way
with you!"

"To spy on our fort," whispers La Chesnaye.

M. Radisson responds that nothing would give greater pleasure.

"I've half a mind to do it," hesitates Ben, looking doubtfully at us.

"To be sure," urges M. Radisson, "come along and have a Christmas with
our merry blades!"

"Why, then, by the Lord, I will!" decides Gillam.  "That is," he added,
"if you'll send the marquis and his man, there, back to my fort as
hostages."

M. Radisson twirled his mustaches thoughtfully, gave the marquis the
same instructions in French as he had given us when we were left in the
New Englander's fort, and turning with a calm face to Ben, bade him get
into our canoe.

But when we launched out M. Radisson headed the craft up-stream in the
wrong direction, whither we paddled till nightfall.  It was cold enough
in all conscience to afford Ben Gillam excuse for tipping a flask from
his jacket-pouch to his teeth every minute or two; but when we were
rested and ready to launch again, the young captain's brain was so
befuddled that he scarce knew whether he were in Boston or on Hudson
Bay.

This time we headed straight down-stream, Ben nodding and dozing from
his place in the middle, M. Radisson, La Chesnaye, and I poling hard to
keep the drift-ice off.  We avoided the New Englander's fort by going
on the other side of the island, and when we shot past Governor
Brigdar's stockades with the lights of the Prince Rupert blinking
through the dark, Ben was fast asleep.

And all the while the winds were piping overhead with a roar as from
the wings of the great storm bird which broods over all that northland.
Then the blore of the trumpeting wind was answered by a counter fugue
from the sea, with a roll and pound of breakers across the sand of the
traverse.  Carried by the swift current, we had shot into the bay.  It
was morning, but the black of night had given place to the white
darkness of northern storm.  Ben Gillam jerked up sober and grasped an
idle pole to lend a hand.  Through the whirl of spray M. Radisson's
figure loomed black at the bow, and above the boom of tumbling waves
came the grinding as of an earthquake.

"We are lost!  We are lost!" shrieked Gillam in panic, cowering back to
the stern.  "The storm's drifted down polar ice from the north and
we're caught!  We're caught!" he cried.

He sprang to his feet as if to leap into that white waste of seething
ice foam.  'Twas the frenzy of terror, which oft seizes men adrift on
ice.  In another moment he would have swamped us under the pitching
crest of a mountain sea.  But M. Radisson turned.  One blow of his pole
and the foolish youth fell senseless to the bottom of the canoe.

"Look, sir, look!" screamed La Chesnaye, "the canoe's getting
ice-logged!  She's sunk to the gun'ales!"

But at the moment when M. Radisson turned to save young Gillam, the
unguided canoe had darted between two rolling seas.  Walls of ice rose
on either side.  A white whirl--a mighty rush--a tumult of roaring
waters--the ice walls pitched down--the canoe was caught--tossed
up--nipped--crushed like a card-box--and we four flung on the drenching
ice-pans to a roll of the seas like to sweep us under, with a footing
slippery as glass.

"Keep hold of Gillam!  Lock hands!" came a clarion voice through the
storm.  "Don't fear, men!  There is no danger!  The gale will drive us
ashore!  Don't fear!  Hold tight!  Hold tight!  There's no danger if
you have no fear!"

The ice heaved and flung to the roll of the drift.

"Hold fast and your wet sleeves will freeze you to the ice!  Steady!"
he called, as the thing fell and rose again.

Then, with the hiss of the world serpent that pursues man to his doom,
we were scudding before a mountain swell.  There was the splintering
report of a cannon-shot.  The ice split.  We clung the closer.  The
rush of waves swept under us, around us, above us.  There came a crash.
The thing gave from below.  The powers of darkness seemed to close over
us, the jaws of the world serpent shut upon their prey, the spirit of
evil shrieked its triumph.

Our feet touched bottom.  The waves fell back, and we were ashore on
the sand-bar of the traverse.

"Run!  Run for your lives!" shouted Radisson.  Jerking up Gillam, whom
the shock had brought to his senses.  "Lock hands and run!"

And run we did, like those spirits in the twilight of the lost, with
never a hope of rescue and never a respite from fear, hand gripping
hand, the tide and the gale and the driving sleet yelping wolfishly at
our heels!  Twas the old, old story of Man leaping undaunted as a
warrior to conquer his foes--turned back!--beaten!--pursued by serpent
and wolf, spirit of darkness and power of destruction, with the light
of life flickering low and the endless frosts creeping close to a heart
beating faint!

Oh, those were giants that we set forth to conquer in that harsh
northland--the giants of the warring elements!  And giants were needed
for the task.

Think you of that when you hear the slighting scorn of the rough
pioneer, because he minceth not his speech, nor weareth ruffs at his
wrists, nor bendeth so low at the knee as your Old-World hero!

The earth fell away from our feet.  We all four tumbled forward.  The
storm whistled past overhead.  And we lay at the bottom of a cliff that
seemed to shelter a multitude of shadowy forms.  We had fallen to a
ravine where the vast caribou herds had wandered from the storm.

Says M. Radisson, with a depth of reverence which words cannot tell,
"Men," says he, "thank God for this deliverance!"

      *      *      *      *      *      *

So unused to man's presence were the caribou, or perhaps so stupefied
by the storm, they let us wander to the centre of the herd, round which
the great bucks had formed a cordon with their backs to the wind to
protect the does and the young.  The heat from the multitude of bodies
warmed us back to life, and I make no doubt the finding of that herd
was God Almighty's provision for our safety.

For three days we wandered with nothing to eat but wild birds done to
death by the gale. [1]  On the third day the storm abated; but it was
still snowing too heavily for us to see a man's length away.  Two or
three times the caribou tossed up their heads sniffing the air
suspiciously, and La Chesnaye fell to cursing lest the wolf-pack should
stampede the herd.  At this Gillam, whose hulking body had wasted from
lack of bulky rations, began to whimper--

"If the wolf-pack come we are lost!"

"Man," says Radisson sternly, "say thy prayers and thank God we are
alive!"

The caribou began to rove aimlessly for a time, then they were off with
a rush that bare gave us chance to escape the army of clicking hoofs.
We were left unprotected in the falling snow.

The primal instincts come uppermost at such times, and like the wild
creatures of the woods facing a foe, instantaneously we wheeled back to
back, alert for the enemy that had frightened the caribou.

"Hist!" whispers Radisson.  "Look!"

Ben Gillam leaped into the air as if he had been shot, shrieking out:
"It's him!  It's him!  Shoot him!  The thief!  The traitor!  It's him!"

He dashed forward, followed by the rest of us, hardly sure whether Ben
were sane.

Three figures loomed through the snowy darkness, white and silent as
the snow itself--vague as phantoms in mist--pointing at us like wraiths
of death--spirit hunters incarnate of that vast wilderness riding the
riotous storm over land and sea.  One swung a weapon aloft.  There was
the scream as of a woman's cry--and the shrieking wind had swept the
snow-clouds about us in a blind fury that blotted all sight.  And when
the combing billows of drift passed, the apparition had faded.  We four
stood alone staring in space with strange questionings.

"Egad!" gasped Radisson, "I don't mind when the wind howls like a wolf,
but when it takes to the death-scream, with snow like the skirts of a
shroud----"

"May the Lord have mercy on us!" muttered La Chesnaye, crossing
himself.  "It is sign of death!  That was a woman's figure.  It is sign
of death!"

"Sign of death!" raged Ben, stamping his impotent fury, "'tis him--'tis
him!  The Judas Iscariot, and he's left us to die so that he may steal
the furs!"

"Hold quiet!" ordered M. Radisson.  "Look, you rantipole--who is that?"

'Twas Le Borgne, the one-eyed, emerging from the gloom of the snow like
a ghost.  By signs and Indian words the fellow offered to guide us back
to our Habitation.

We reached the fort that night, Le Borgne flitting away like a shadow,
as he had come.  And the first thing we did was to hold a service of
thanks to God Almighty for our deliverance.


[1] See Radisson's account--Prince Society (1885), Boston--Bodleian
Library.--Canadian Archives, 1895-'96.




CHAPTER XIV

A CHALLENGE

Filling the air with ghost-shadows, silencing earth, muffling the sea,
day after day fell the snow.  Shore-ice barred out the pounding surf.
The river had frozen to adamant.  Brushwood sank in the deepening drifts
like a foundered ship, and all that remained visible of evergreens was an
occasional spar or snow mushroom on the crest of a branch.

No east, no west, no day, no night; nothing but a white darkness,
billowing snow, and a silence as of death.  It was the cold, silent,
mystic, white world of northern winter.

At one moment the fort door flings wide with a rush of frost like smoke
clouds, and in stamps Godefroy, shaking snow off with boisterous noise
and vowing by the saints that the drifts are as high as the St. Pierre's
deck.  M. Groseillers orders the rascal to shut the door; but bare has
the latch clicked when young Jean whisks in, tossing snow from cap and
gauntlets like a clipper shaking a reef to the spray, and declares that
the snow is already level with the fort walls.

"Eh, nephew," exclaims Radisson sharply, "how are the cannon?"

Ben Gillam, who has lugged himself from bed to the hearth for the first
time since his freezing, blurts out a taunting laugh.  We had done better
to build on the sheltered side of an island, he informs us.

"Now, the shivers take me!" cries Ben, "but where a deuce are all your
land forces and marines and jack-tars and forty thousand officers?"

He cast a scornful look down our long, low-roofed barracks, counting the
men gathered round the hearth and laughing as he counted.  M. Radisson
affected not to hear, telling Jean to hoist the cannon and puncture
embrasures high to the bastion-roofs like Italian towers.

"Monsieur Radisson," impudently mouths Ben, who had taken more rum for
his health than was good for his head, "I asked you to inform me where
your land forces are?"

"Outside the fort constructing a breastwork of snow."

"Good!" sneers Ben.  "And the marines?"

"On the ships, where they ought to be."

"Good!" laughs Gillam again.  "And the officers?"

"Superintending the raising of the cannon.  And I would have you to know,
young man," adds Radisson, "that when a guest asks too many questions, a
host may not answer."

But Ben goes on unheeding.

"Now I'll wager that dog of a runaway slave o' mine, that Jack Battle
who's hiding hereabouts, I'll wager the hangdog slave and pawn my head
you haven't a corporal's guard o' marines and land forces all told!"

M. Radisson never allowed an enemy's taunt to hasten speech or act.  He
looked at Ben with a measuring glance which sized that fellow very small
indeed.

"Then I must decline your wager, Ben," says he.  "In the first place,
Jack Battle is mine already.  In the second, you would lose ten times
over.  In the third, you have few enough men already.  And in the fourth,
your head isn't worth pawn for a wager; though I may take you, body and
boots, all the same," adds he.

With that he goes off, leaving Ben blowing curses into the fire like a
bellows.  The young rake bawled out for more gin, and with head sunk on
his chest began mutteri

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/18182