Fort Amity

Fifteen years have gone by, and a few months. In December 1775, on the rock of Quebec, Great Britain clung with a last desperate grip upon Canada, which on that September day in...

They had threaded their course through the many islets at the foot of the lake, and were speeding down the headwaters of the Richelieu. The forests had closed in upon them, shut...

Time pressing, the Commandant had gone straight from the orderly-room in search of Father Joly. As a soldier and a good Catholic he desired to be shriven, and as a man of habit...

The encampment stood under the lee of a tall sandhill, a few paces back from the brink of a frozen river. Here the forest ended in a ragged fringe of pines; and, below, the rive...

"So adieu, Jack, until we meet in Quebec! You have the start of us, report says, and this may even find you drinking his Majesty's health in Fort Carillon. Why not? You carry Ho...

Two days later Amherst landed his troops at La Chine, marched them unopposed to Montreal, and encamped before the city on its western side. Within the walls M. de Vaudreuil call...

The Fort stood high on a wooded slope around which the river swept through narrows to spread itself below in a lake three miles wide and almost thirty long. In shape it was quad...

But Meshu-kwa claimed the head of her ancestress, and set it up on a scaffold within the lodge, spreading a new blanket beneath it and strewing tobacco-leaf in front of its nose...

"That will be at La Galette," said the Commandant, answering the question in Dominique's eyes. "Come up to your quarters, my children, and get some sleep. We have work before us...

Dominique Guyon departed shortly before noon; and a week later half a dozen _habitants_ arrived from Boisveyrac to work at the entrenchment which the Commandant had already open...

That Spring, three British generals sat at the three gates of Canada, waiting for the signal to enter and end the last agony of New France. But the snows melted, the days length...

They had run the Galops rapids, Point Iroquois, Point Cardinal, the Rapide Plat, without disaster though not without heavy toil. The fury of the falls far exceeded Amherst's exp...

Within the curtain-wall facing the waterside the ground had been terraced up to form a high platform or _terre-plein_, whence six guns, mounted in embrasures, commanded the rive...

"I was right then, after all, M. a Clive, in maintaining that your comrade carried a message from the General. My daughter has told me how you came, between you, to discover it....

A band of five-and-twenty Ojibways came filing down through the woods to the shore of Lake Ontario, at the point where the City of Toronto now stands. Back beyond the Lake aux C...

The man at the bow paddle set the chorus, which was taken up by boat after boat. John, stretched at the bottom of a canoe with two wounded Highlanders, wondered where he had hea...

"Dominique," said he at length, "there is something in your guests that puzzles me; and something too that puzzles me in the manner of their coming to Boisveyrac. Tell me now pr...

Thenceforward, as the forest folded them deeper, John found a wonderful solace in Bateese's company, although the two seldom exchanged a word unless alone together, and after a...

At the alarm-post next morning the men were in high spirits again. Everyone seemed to be posted in the day's work ahead. The French had thrown up an outwork on the landward end...

Hitherto the forest had awed John by its loneliness; its night-voices, falling at rare intervals on his ear and awaking him from dreams beside the camp-fire, had seemed to cry a...

For minutes before John heard and answered it the question had been singing in his ears to the beat of the paddles. He supposed that Menehwehna had asked it but a moment ago.

The red-coats, who had forced their way up the tower by weight of numbers and at the point of the bayonet, were now ordered to face about and clear the stairway; which they did,...

That song was his anodyne. All day he had let it lull his conscience, rousing himself irritably as from a drugged sleep to answer the questions put to him by Dominique or the pr...

The stone fort of Ticonderoga stood far out on a bluff at the head of Lake Champlain, its base descending on the one hand into the still lake-water, on the other swept by the ri...

Along the river-front of Boisveyrac, on the slopes between the stone walls of the Seigniory and the broad St. Lawrence, Dominique Guyon, the Seigneur's farmer, strode to and fro...

Barboux's complexion had turned to a sick yellow beneath its mottles. He had been walking hard, and had eaten too much throughout the voyage; no doubt, too, the sunset light pai...

Next morning Barboux and Menehwehna held a long colloquy aft, but in tones so low that John could not catch a word. By and by Muskingon was called into council, and lastly le Ch...