Part 12

I was about to say "son," but luckily Joncaire interrupted in time.

"'Twill be that fine lass, Rosette, his niece!" he exclaimed. "Ah, I knew it."

"And she has taken a husband," I encouraged him, now so far committed that I might not draw back.

"Not young Voisin, the miller's son!"

"No, monsieur; a stranger from a far corner of the diocese. One Michel."

We were now in the entrance of the log house, and Joncaire opened wide the door.

"Jean, you are a lad in a million!" he pronounced. "You shall drink deep. I have some wine which Bigon the _intendant_ fetched out for a few of us--you will understand you must say naught of it hereafter; it never paid duty. Aye, we shall make a fine night of it, and you shall tell me of all that has passed in Arles these many years.

"_Mon Dieu_! I could weep at the thought of the time I have spent in this place of devils; and my children will never know the country that their father came from!"

Ta-wan-ne-ars would have followed us indoors, but Joncaire turned and pushed him down on the doorstep.

"Sit, sit," he said kindly in a tongue which Ta-wan-ne-ars afterward told me was the Messesague dialect. "You shall have your food here."

And to me--

"Our own Indians I will tolerate when I must, but I want no strange savages stealing my stores."

"_Monsieur_ has a family here?" I asked as we took our seats at a rough table in the front room.

"Here! Never! Although I have one son who will soon be able to carry on his father's work."

"One son? That is too bad. Now in Picardy----"

"_Mort de ma vie_! Would you talk to me of your Picards! Young man, each Autumn that I return to Montreal--and it has been many Autumns, let me tell you--Madame de Joncaire has a new little one to introduce to me."

His face softened.

"Bless me if I know how that old lady does it!" he sighed. "We have ten now--or maybe 'tis twelve. But I am not sure. I must count up when I return this year."

He clapped his hands, and a soldier in the undress uniform of the French marine troops, who formed the major part of the garrison of Canada, entered.

"François," announced Joncaire, "this is Jean Courbevoir, who will be my guest until he departs. He has been in Arles, François. Remember that. It should be a part of each young man's training to visit Arles.

"What he orders you will render to him. Now bring us the flagon of wine which Monsieur Bigon sent out this Spring."

The soldier saluted me as if I were a marshal of France, and brought in the flagon of the _intendant's_ wine with the exquisite reverence which only a son of France could bestow upon the choicest product of the soil of France.

"Pour it out, François," commanded Joncaire.

The soldier hesitated.

"And Monsieur de Lery?" he said.

"A thousand million curses!" exploded Joncaire. "Am I to wait for him? Am I to sacrifice my choicest wine in his gullet!"

"Who is Monsieur de Lery?" I asked as François filled a thick mug with the ruby juice.

"What? You do not know him? That is a good one, that! I should like to have had him hear you say it. But do you mean you do not know of him?"

"_Monsieur_ will remember I am of the wilderness," I protested.

"True, true. And this pompous whipper-snapper who sets out to teach Louis Thomas de Joncaire, Sieur de Chabert, his duty, after thirty-five years on the frontier--pah!"

He drained his mug, and pushed it toward François for more.

"But you have not told me who he is, monsieur," I said.

"He is----"

"Monsieur de Lery enters," interposed François with a glance at the doorway.

XVI

TRAPPED

A slender, wiry little man in a wig several sizes too big for him strode into the room. He had a thin face, near-sighted eyes and a bulging forehead. He favored me with a curious glance, nodded to Joncaire and took a seat across the table from me.

My host made a wry smile and motioned to François to bring a third mug.

"Hola, Monsieur de Lery," he said. "This is a gallant young forest-runner, one Jean Courbevoir, who has come to tell me that charming idiot Alphonse de Tonty has been chased out of Le de Troit by the Messesagues. Jean, Monsieur de Lery is the King's engineer officer in Canada."

"Another case of a log fortification, I suppose," remarked de Lery sarcastically in a dry, crackling voice.

He paid no attention to the introduction to me.

"You gentlemen will never learn," he added.

"You must think we grow louis d'or instead of furs in Canada," growled Joncaire. "Be sure, we of the wilderness posts are the most anxious to have stone walls around us. Well, what headway have you made?"

"I have traced out the lines of the central mass," replied de Lery, taking a gulp of the wine. "Tomorrow I shall mark out a surrounding work of four bastions to encompass it."

"And you insist it shall be at the confluence of the river and the lake?"

"There can be no doubt 'tis the proper spot," declared de Lery didactically, "both from the engineering and the strategical points of view."

"But I am telling you--I, Louis Thomas de Joncaire, Sieur de Chabert, who have been thirty-five years in this accursed country--that if you do so you will have no sheltered anchorage for shipping. Moreover, you will sacrifice the buildings we have erected here."

De Lery pushed back his mug.

"All very well," he answered; "but your position here does not command the lake. If the English chose they could blockade you in the river, and your anchorage would go for naught. Furthermore, there is great difficulty in navigating craft this far up the river against a current of nearly three leagues an hour."

"Bah!" exclaimed Joncaire. "You know everything."

"I am an engineer," returned de Lery pompously. "You are a soldier. I should not attempt to dictate to you."

Joncaire appealed to me. He was on his third mug of wine, and the mellow stuff had rekindled his odd friendship for me.

"Come, _mon Jean_," he cried, "what do you say to it! You are a man of experience. You have been to Arles. I think you implied that you had seen service in the Army in France?"

"As a sergeant only, _monsieur_," I answered modestly. "In the Regiment de la Reine."

"A famous corps," he proclaimed. "Your opinion has weight with me, Jean. You are a man of sense and judgment. What is your opinion on this subject we debate?"

"_Ma foi, monsieur,_" I said cautiously, "I am scarcely fitted to discuss it with two gentlemen of your wisdom and experience. I am frank to say I do not understand the issue."

"De Lery, we will leave the matter to this youth's honest candor," suggested Joncaire.

"With your favor, _monsieur_, we will not," replied the engineer decisively.

He rose from his seat.

"Speaking for myself, I have had sufficient wine, and I shall retire. If the masons bring in the loads of stone we expect in the morning, we shall be able to lay the first course by noon."

Joncaire twisted his face into a grimace as de Lery ascended a steep flight of ladder-stairs to an upper story.

"What a man to live with!" he apostrophized. "_Mon Dieu_, nobody knows the agonies I suffer! Me, I am a man of compassion, of friendliness, of respect for another's opinion. But that man--_tonnerrr-rrr-rr-re de Dieu_! For him there are no opinions but his own."

"What is the difficulty, _monsieur_?" I inquired sympathetically.

"Why, at last I have persuaded this stupid, timorous government of ours to build me a proper fort. 'Tis the only way we shall hold the _sacré_ English in check.

"You have intelligence, Jean. You know the country to the West. 'Tis manifest that with a fort here we can control in some measure the intercourse betwixt the western tribes and the English. Also, we shall have a constant threat here to keep the Iroquois at peace."

"That is readily understood, monsieur."

"Of course. Well, I worked up Vaudreuil to approve it, obtained the grants from Paris, secured the necessary mechanics--and then they sent this popinjay to supervise the work. I had pitched on this site here. He would have none of it. No, he must overturn all my plans and put the new works several miles down the river where it runs into the lake.

"And he will not listen to reason. He is so conceited with himself because he has been charged with all the works of fortification in Canada."

"Are there others then, _monsieur_?" I asked casually, burying my nose in the wine-mug.

"Aye, to be sure. He is to build a wall around Montreal, and to strengthen the _enceinte_ of Quebec."

"But we are at peace with these _sacré_ English," I objected.

Joncaire, now thoroughly convivial, winked at me over the rim of his mug.

"For the present, yes. But how long, Jean? Ah, my lad, you are young, and I can see you have the brains to carry you far. Here in Canada family counts for less than in Paris. But after all you are not of those who know the high politics of the day--not yet."

"I am a poor, ignorant youth whom _monsieur_ is pleased to honor," I said humbly.

"And _monsieur_ is pleased to instruct you," he answered. "Yes, we can not go on as we have been, Jean. Every year that passes the English grow in strength, and we become weaker; I speak now in matters of trade; for after all, lad, the country which obtains the mastery in trade must be the military master of any contending nation. I may be only a simple soldier, but so much I have learned."

"Ah, but _monsieur_ is pleased to be down-hearted!" I cried. "'Tis plain we are stronger than the English. Are not our posts stretched thousands of miles beyond theirs?"

"Pouf! What of that? We are a colony of soldiers and traders, well armed and disciplined. They are an infinitely larger group of colonies with only a few soldiers and traders, but many husbandmen. Give them time, and they will obtain such a grip on the soil of the wilderness that they can not be pried loose. But if we use our temporary advantage, and keep them from winning supremacy in the trade with the savages, then, my Jean, we may force a war upon them at an early day, and we shall win."

He sat back, and eyed me triumphantly.

"Surely we have that supremacy now!"

He winked at me again, and drew from a drawer in the table a heavy book such as accounts are kept in.

"Jean," he said, "I am about to disclose to you a secret--which is not a secret, because every trader who works for himself is acquainted with it."

He flipped through the pages.

"Here is the account for this post for the year just ended. We handled a total of 204 'green' deerskins and 23 packets of various kinds of furs. On these we cleared a profit of 2,382 livres, 3 sols, 9 deniers,[1] which would not come anywhere near covering the operating expenses of the post. You will find the same story at every post from here to the Mississippi."

[1] About $476.

"Why, _monsieur_?"

"These _sacré_ English! First they turn the Iroquois against us--and in that success, I am bound to say, they have been ably assisted by ourselves;[2] then they build the post of Fort Oswego, at the foot of the Onondaga's River on Irondequoit Bay;[3] then they send out a swarm of young men to trap and shoot in the Indian country; then they pass this accursed law that forbids us obtaining Indian goods from the New York merchants! _Peste_, what a people! They have us in a noose."

[2] Joncaire was one of the few Frenchmen who had the confidence of the Iroquois. He had been captured as a young man by the Senecas and adopted into that tribe.

[3] Now Oswego, N.Y.

I shook my head dolefully.

"Ah, _monsieur_, you make me very sorrowful," I said. "I came out to Canada thinking to make my fortune, but if what you say be true, I am more likely to be killed by the English."

"No, no, it's not so bad as that," he answered quickly. "The governor-general has waked up. It seems that in France they are not quite ready for another war, but we are charged to make preparations as rapidly as possible. There is an emissary coming soon from Paris, who will have instructions for the frontier posts and the friendly Indians. It may be we can persuade the English to be stupid enough to revoke this law of theirs. In any case, my Jean, you will have heard of the Doom Trail?"

I crossed myself devoutly.

"I have heard nothing good of it, _monsieur_," I said fearfully.

"Humph; I don't doubt it. And mind you, Jean, for myself, I do not like that kind of business. But after all 'tis the trade over the Doom Trail which keeps you and me in our jobs. Without it--well, this post would shut down. And they do say at Quebec that if we can start a revolution in England for this Pretender of theirs and war at the same time, we shall be able to take the whole continent from them."

"And who is this emissary you spoke of?" I asked, thinking to extract more information from the bibulous Joncaire.

"Not of your----"

There was a commotion at the door.

"Bind the Indian," shouted a voice in French. "Hah, I thought so! We meet again, Ormerod!"

De Veulle stood on the threshold, his rifle leveled at my breast.

"Bring the Indian inside here," he called behind him. "We'll have a look at him in the light."

A group of Cahnuagas, frightfully painted, with their grotesque bristling feather headdresses, hustled Ta-wan-ne-ars into the room.

But now Joncaire asserted himself.

"What do you mean by this, Monsieur de Veulle?" he demanded with a cold displeasure which showed no signs of his recent indulgences. "This man is a forest-runner, Jean Courbevoir, a messenger from de Tonty. The Indian is a Messesague--as you should see by his paint and bead-work."

"Bah!" sneered de Veulle. "They fooled you. The Indian is Ta-wan-ne-ars, of the Seneca Wolves, War Chief of the Iroquois. The white man is Harry Ormerod, an English spy and a deserter from the Jacobites. He was stationed in Paris for some years, and recently was sent to New York. Burnet, the Governor of New York, dispatched him here to spy out what you were doing. 'Twas fortunate I had an errand to Jagara, for he seems to have deluded you completely."

"That may be so," assented Joncaire; "but it happens that I command here. These men are my prisoners. You will order your Indians from the room. François, get your musket and stand guard."

De Veulle drew a paper from a pocket inside his leather shirt and presented it to Joncaire with irritating deliberation.

"Here," he said, "you will find my warrant from the King himself to exercise what powers I deem necessary along the frontier. Only the governor-general may overrule me."

Joncaire studied the paper.

"That is so," he admitted. "But I tell you this, de Veulle, you have a bad record on the frontier for a trouble-maker. But for you I should have had the Senecas and Onondagas in our interest before this. I write to Quebec by the first post, demanding a check upon your activities. We have too much at stake to permit you to jeopardize it."

"At De-o-nun-de-ga-a it is known that Ta-wan-ne-ars and his brother Ormerod journeyed to Jagara," interposed the Seneca in his own language. "Does Joncaire think the Senecas will be quiet when one of their chiefs is given up to the Keepers of the Doom Trail for torment?"

"The Senecas will be told that you never reached Jagara," replied de Veulle before Joncaire could speak.

"I will have nothing to do with it," declared the commandant of the post. "Spies they may be, and as such they may be imprisoned; but I will have nothing to do with turning them over to the Keepers. De Veulle, this is on your own head."

"I am content," said de Veulle with a mocking smile.

Joncaire turned to me.

"Well, my Jean," he said soberly, "whatever your name may be, you have gotten yourself into a nasty mess. You will be lucky if you die quickly. This is what comes of trying to fool old Papa Joncaire."

"You will admit that I fooled you," I replied as lightly as I could.

"You did," he conceded, "and you are nearly the first."

"Will you do me a favor in memory of Arles--I have really visited that renowned city--_monsieur_?"

"Gladly."

"Get word sometime to Peter Corlaer that I fooled you, and 'twas no fault of mine I was taken."

He clapped me on the back.

"That's the spirit, _mon brave_! I'll do it without fail. And my advice to you is to pick the first chance to die, no matter how it may be. These Keepers--_peste_! They are a bad lot. They are artists in torment. 'Tis part of their religion, which I will say they still practise, even though Père Hyacinthe were to excommunicate me."

"Better not let the worthy priest hear you," admonished de Veulle with his mocking smile. "Have you finished your homily and last word to the condemned?"

"I have finished my last word to you," snarled Joncaire.

"Perhaps, _monsieur_," I said, "you have never chanced to hear of a certain duel with small-swords in the ----"

De Veulle struck me with all his strength across the mouth.

"Here," he called to the waiting Cahnuagas, "bind him--and make a sure job of it. Be not careful of his comfort."

Joncaire looked him up and down with indescribable contempt.

"There is a bad air in here, Monsieur Englishman," he said. "Even the company of that ass de Lery is preferable to this miserable person. I bid you adieu."

But as he was about to climb the stairs de Lery had ascended, de Veulle called him back.

"One moment! Speaking officially, Monsieur de Joncaire, I desire you to send out belts to all friendly tribes, summoning them to a council-fire which will be held here by the King's command in August."

Joncaire bowed.

"It shall be done," he said.

"Now then"--de Veulle addressed me--"we will consider your case. Are the bonds sufficiently tight?"

I had been bound with strips of rawhide which cut into every muscle. The question was superfluous.

"Pick them up," he said to the Cahnuagas. "We will get back to the canoes."

One of the Keepers objected, seeming to suggest that they rest the night at least; but de Veulle silenced him with a frown.

"We start at once," he said. "There will be time to rest after we are out in the lake."

Ta-wan-ne-ars and I were slung like sacks of grain each upon the shoulders of a pair of warriors and so carried past several phlegmatically interested French soldiers to the bank of the river. Here we were laid carefully in the bottoms of separate canoes, which were shoved out into the swirling current and borne swiftly down-stream into the spreading waters of the Cadarakui Lake.

Despite the tightness of my bonds and the numbness they induced, I fell asleep, rocked by the easy motion of the canoe as it was driven along by the powerful arms of the Cahnuagas, who crouched in line, one behind the other, their paddles dipping in and out of the water like tireless machines.

XVII

LA VIERGE DU BOIS

A dash of water awakened me. One of the Cahnuagas was leaning down, his hideous face close to mine, his fingers wrestling with the knots in the rawhide bonds.

"You can not lie idle, my distinguished guest," called de Veulle from his place at the stern. "You must keep us dry."

As the rawhide strips were unwound I was able to sit up and look over the frail bark side. We were out of sight of land, and a moderate breeze was raising a slight swell, the crest of which occasionally broke over our bow. In the other canoe Ta-wan-ne-ars already was at work with a bark scoop.

The Cahnuagas were uneasy, and at times they muttered amongst themselves; but de Veulle kept them at the paddles, working in relays of four. It said much for his hold on the Indians that he was able to persuade them to navigate the treacherous waters of the open lake, a feat the savages will never attempt except under compulsion.

All of that day we were isolated on the restless surface of the huge inland sea. Just before dusk of the second day we sighted a rocky coast, and sheered away from it. Two nights later we passed a group of lights to the north, and the Cahnuagas murmured "Cadaraqui." Indeed, 'twas the French fort of that name, the key to the westerly defenses of Canada and the St. Lawrence outlet from the lake.[1] On the sixth day we passed out of the lake into the narrow channel of the great river, and landed in the evening at a palisaded post on the southern bank.

[1] Later Fort Frontenac.

So far I had been treated fairly well. My captors had shared with me their meager fare of parched corn and jerked meat; and if I had been compelled to bale out the canoe incessantly, it was equally true that they had labored at the paddles night and day. It was also true that de Veulle had made me the constant subject of his gibes and kicks and had encouraged the Cahnuagas--and God knows they required no encouragement--to maul me at pleasure. Yet the frailty of the canoe had forbidden indulgence in as much roughness as they desired.

But now everything was changed. My legs were left unbound, but with uncanny skill the savages lashed back my arms until well-nigh every bit of circulation was stopped in them and each movement I was forced to make became an act of torture. The one recompense for my sufferings was that for the first time since our capture I had the company of Ta-wan-ne-ars, and I was able to profit by his stoical demeanor in resisting the impulse to vent my anger against de Veulle.

"Say nothing, brother," he counseled me when I panted my hate, "for every word you say will afford him satisfaction."

"I wish I had staved in the canoe in the middle of the lake," I exclaimed bitterly.

"Ta-wan-ne-ars, too, thought of that," he admitted. "Yet must we have died with our tormenters, and perhaps if we wait we may escape and live to slay them at less cost to ourselves."

"It is not likely," I answered, for my spirits were very low. "What is this place? Where are we?"

Ta-wan-ne-ars looked around the landscape, rapidly dimming in the twilight. We had been left in custody of the Indians on the river-bank whilst de Veulle conversed with three white men who had emerged from the palisades as we scrambled ashore.

"This place Ta-wan-ne-ars does not know," he replied. "Yet it is on the river St. Lawrence, for there is no other stream of this size. I think, brother, that de Veulle is taking us to La Vierge du Bois."

"It matters little where he takes us," I returned ill-naturedly. "Our end is like to be the same in any case."

"At the least," said Ta-wan-ne-ars with a smile, "we shall have solved the riddle of the Doom Trail."

"And what will that avail us?" I countered. "Joncaire told me all I sought to know of Jagara--but he told it to a dead man."

"Not yet dead, brother," Ta-wan-ne-ars corrected me gently. "We have still a long way to go--and we have our search."

"Which is like to lead us into the hands of ----," I said rudely.

But de Veulle and the three strange Frenchmen walked up at that moment, and Ta-wan-ne-ars was spared the necessity of an answer.

"'Tis well," de Veulle was saying. "We will rest the night, then. I'll lodge my prisoners in the stockade."

"And there is naught else!" asked one of the others.

"The letter to Père Hyacinthe--don't forget that."

Whereat they all four laughed with a kind of sinister mystery and cast glances of amusement at us.

"I would I might see the Moon Feast," said another.

"Some day, if you are accepted amongst the Ga-go-sra, you may," returned de Veulle. "Be ready with the letter, I beg you. I must start early with the daylight if I am to be in time for the feast."

The Cahnuagas drove us from the bank with kicks and blows of their paddle-blades, and the white men followed leisurely, laughing now and then as we dodged some particularly vicious attack upon our heads and faces. As it was, when we were flung into a bare log-walled room within the palisade we were covered with bruises. 'Twas the real beginning of our torment.