Chapter III: Part 3

"Very good, monsieur. I'll tell your mother," she said, trembling and putting up a lip.

But nothing except noise was attempted at Beauport. Jacques was so weary, as he toiled back uphill in diminishing light, that he gratefully crawled upon a cart and lay still, letting it take him wherever the carter might be going. There were not enough horses and oxen in Canada to move the supplies for the army from Montreal to Quebec by land. Transports had to slip down the St. Lawrence by night, running a gauntlet of vigilant English vessels. Yet whenever the intendant Bigot wanted to shift anything, he did not lack oxen or wheels. Jacques did not talk to the carter, but he knew a load of king's provisions was going out to some favorite of the intendant's who had been set to guard the northern heights. The stealings of this popular civil officer were common talk in Quebec.

That long slope called the Plains of Abraham, which swept away from the summit of the rock toward Cap Rouge, seemed very near the sky. Jacques watched dusk envelop this place. Patches of faded herbage and stripped corn, and a few trees only, broke the monotony of its extent. On the north side, overhanging the winding valley of the St. Charles, the rock's great shoulder was called Côte Ste. Geneviève. The bald plain was about a mile wide, but the cart jogged a mile and a half from Quebec before it reached the tents where its freight was to be discharged.

Habit had taken the young Repentigny daily to his father's camp, but this was the first time he had seen the guard along the heights. Montcalm's soldiers knew him. He was permitted to handle arms. Many a boy of fifteen was then in the ranks, and children of his age were growing used to war. His father called it his apprenticeship to the trade. A few empty houses stood some distance back of the tents; and farther along the precipice, beyond brush and trees, other guards were posted. Seventy men and four cannon completed the defensive line which Montcalm had drawn around the top of the rock. Half the number could have kept it, by vigilance. And it was evident that the officer in charge thought so, and was taking advantage of his general's bounty.

"Remember I am sending you to my field as well as to your own," the boy overheard him say. Nearly all his company were gathered in a little mob before his tent. He sat there on a camp stool. They were Canadians from Lorette, anxious for leave of absence, and full of promises.

"Yes, monsieur, we will remember your field." "Yes, Captain Vergor, your grain as soon as we have gathered ours in." "It shall be done, captain."

Jacques had heard of Vergor. A few years before, Vergor had been put under arrest for giving up Fort Beauséjour, in Acadia, to the English without firing a shot. The boy thought it strange that such a man should be put in charge of any part of the defensive cordon around Quebec. But Vergor had a friend in the intendant Bigot, who knew how to reinstate his disgraced favorites. The arriving cart drew the captain's attention from his departing men. He smiled, his depressed nose and fleshy lips being entirely good-natured.

"A load of provisions, and a recruit for my company," he said.

"Monsieur the captain needs recruits," observed Jacques.

"Society is what I need most," said Vergor. "And from appearances I am going to have it at my supper which the cook is about to set before me."

"I think I will stay all night here," said Jacques.

"You overwhelm me," responded Vergor.

"There are so many empty tents."

"Fill as many of them as you can," suggested Vergor. "You are doubtless much away from your mother, inspecting the troops; but what will madame say if you fail to answer at her roll call to-night?"

"Nothing. I should be in my father's tent at Montreal, if she had been able to go when he was ordered back there."

"Who is your father?"

"Le Gardeur de Repentigny."

Vergor drew his lips together for a soft whistle, as he rose to direct the storing of his goods.

"It is a young general with whom I am to have the honor of messing. I thought he had the air of camps and courts the moment I saw his head over the side of the cart."

Many a boy secretly despises the man to whose merry insolence he submits. But the young Repentigny felt for Vergor such contempt as only an incompetent officer inspires.

No sentinels were stationed. The few soldiers remaining busied themselves over their mess fires. Jacques looked down a cove not quite as steep as the rest of the cliff, yet as nearly perpendicular as any surface on which trees and bushes can take hold. It was clothed with a thick growth of sere weeds, cut by one hint of a diagonal line. Perhaps laborers at a fulling mill now rotting below had once climbed this rock. Rain had carried the earth from above in small cataracts down its face, making a thin alluvial coating. A strip of land separated the rock from the St. Lawrence, which looked wide and gray in the evening light. Showers raked the far-off opposite hills. Leaves showing scarlet or orange were dulled by flying mist.

The boy noticed more boats drifting up river on the tide than he had counted in Quebec Basin.

"Where are all the vessels going?" he asked the nearest soldier.

"Nowhere. They only move back and forth with the tide."

"But they are English ships. Why don't you fire on them?"

"We have no orders. And besides, our own transports have to slip down among them at night. One is pretty careful not to knock the bottom out of the dish which carries his meat."

"The English might land down there some dark night."

"They may land; but, unfortunately for themselves, they have no wings."

The boy did not answer, but he thought, "If my father and General Levis were posted here, wings would be of no use to the English."

His distinct little figure, outlined against the sky, could be seen from the prisoners' ship. One prisoner saw him without taking any note that he was a child. Her eyes were fierce and red-rimmed. She was the only woman on the deck, having come up the gangway to get rid of habitantes. These fellow-prisoners of hers were that moment putting their heads together below and talking about Mademoiselle Jeannette Descheneaux. They were perhaps the only people in the world who took any thought of her. Highlanders and seamen moving on deck scarcely saw her. In every age of the world beauty has ruled men. Jeannette Descheneaux was a big, manly Frenchwoman, with a heavy voice. In Quebec, she was a contrast to the exquisite and diaphanous creatures who sometimes kneeled beside her in the cathedral, or looked out of sledge or sedan chair at her as she tramped the narrow streets. They were the beauties of the governor's court, who permitted in a new land the corrupt gallantries of Versailles. She was the daughter of a shoemaker, and had been raised to a semi-official position by the promotion of her brother in the government. Her brother had grown rich with the company of speculators who preyed on the province and the king's stores. He had one motherless child, and Jeannette took charge of it and his house until the child died. She was perhaps a masculine nourisher of infancy; yet the upright mark between her black eyebrows, so deep that it seemed made by a hatchet, had never been there before the baby's death; and it was by stubbornly venturing too far among the parishes to seek the child's foster mother, who was said to be in some peril at Petit Cap, that Jeannette got herself taken prisoner.

For a month this active woman had been a dreamer of dreams. Every day the prison ship floated down to Quebec, and her past stood before her like a picture. Every night it floated up to Cap Rouge, where French camp fires flecked the gorge and the north shore stretching westward. No strict guard was kept over the prisoners. She sat on the ship's deck, and a delicious languor, unlike any former experience, grew and grew upon her. The coaxing graces of pretty women she never caricatured. Her skin was of the dark red tint which denotes a testy disposition. She had fierce one-sided wars for trivial reasons, and was by nature an aggressive partisan, even in the cause of a dog or a cat. Being a woman of few phrases, she repeated these as often as she had occasion for speech, and divided the world simply into two classes: two or three individuals, including herself, were human beings; the rest of mankind she denounced, in a voice which shook the walls, as spawn. One does not like to be called spawn.

Though Jeannette had never given herself to exaggerated worship, she was religious. The lack of priest and mass on the prison transport was blamed for the change which came over her. A haze of real feminine softness, like the autumn's purpling of rocks, made her bones less prominent. But the habitantes, common women from the parishes, who had children and a few of their men with them, saw what ailed her. They noticed that while her enmity to the English remained unchanged, she would not hear a word against the Highlanders, though Colonel Fraser and his Seventy-Eighth Highland regiment had taken her prisoner. It is true, Jeannette was treated with deference, and her food was sent to her from the officer's table, and she had privacy on the ship which the commoner prisoners had not. It is also true that Colonel Fraser was a gentleman, detesting the parish-burning to which his command was ordered for a time. But the habitantes laid much to his blue eyes and yellow hair, and the picturesqueness of the red and pale green Fraser tartan. They nudged one another when Jeannette began to plait her strong black locks, and make a coronet of them on her sloping head. She was always exact and neat in her dress, and its mannishness stood her in good stead during her month's imprisonment. Rough wool was her invariable wear, instead of taffetas and silky furs, which Quebec women delighted in. She groomed herself carefully each day for that approach to the English camp at Point Levi which the tide accomplished. Her features could be distinguished half a mile. On the days when Colonel Fraser's fezlike plumed bonnet was lifted to her in the camp, she went up the river again in a trance of quiet. On other days the habitantes laughed, and said to one another, "Mademoiselle will certainly break through the deck with her tramping."

There was a general restlessness on the prison ship. The English sailors wanted to go home. The Canadians had been patient since the middle of August. But this particular September night, as they drifted up past the rock, and saw the defenses of their country bristling against them, the feeling of homesickness vented itself in complaints. Jeannette was in her cabin, and heard them abuse Colonel Fraser and his Highlanders as kidnapers of women and children, and burners of churches. She came out of her retreat, and hovered over them like a hawk. The men pulled their caps off, drolly grinning.

"It is true," added one of them, "that General Montcalm is to blame for letting the parishes burn. And at least he might take us away from the English."

"Do you think Monsieur de Montcalm has nothing to do but bring you in off the river?" demanded Jeannette.

"Mademoiselle does not want to be brought in," retorted one of the women. "As for us, we are not in love with these officers who wear petticoats, or with any of our enemies."

"Spawn!" Jeanette hurled at them. Yet her partisan fury died in her throat. She went up on deck to be away from her accusers. The seamed precipice, the indented cove with the child's figure standing at the top, and all the panorama to which she was so accustomed by morning light or twilight passed before her without being seen by her fierce red-rimmed eyes.

Jeannette Descheneaux had walked through the midst of colonial intrigues without knowing that they existed. Men she ignored; and she could not now account for her keen knowledge that there was a colonel of the Seventy-Eighth Highlanders. Her entanglement had taken her in the very simplicity of childhood. She could not blame him. He had done nothing but lift his bonnet to her, and treat her with deference because he was sorry she had fallen into his hands. But at first she fought with silent fury the power he unconsciously held over her. She felt only the shame of it, which the habitantes had cast upon her. Nobody had ever called Jeannette Descheneaux a silly woman. In early life it was thought she had a vocation for the convent; but she drew back from that, and now she was suddenly desolate. Her brother had his consolations. There was nothing for her.

Scant tears, oozing like blood, moistened her eyes. She took hold of her throat to strangle a sob. Her teeth chattered in the wind blowing down river. Constellations came up over the rock's long shoulder. Though it was a dark night, the stars were clear. She took no heed of the French camp fires in the gorge and along the bank. The French commander there had followed the erratic motions of English boats until they ceased to alarm him. It was flood tide. The prison ship sat on the water, scarcely swinging.

At one o'clock Jeannette was still on deck, having watched through the midnight of her experience. She had no phrases for her thoughts. They were dumb, but they filled her to the outermost layer of her skin, and deadened sensation.

Boats began to disturb her, however. They trailed past the ship with a muffled swish, all of them disappearing in the darkness. This gathering must have been going on some time before she noticed it. The lantern hanging aloft made a mere warning spot in the darkness, for the lights on deck had been put out. All the English ships, when she looked about her, were to be guessed at, for not a port-hole cast its cylinder of radiance on the water. Night muffled their hulls, and their safety lights hung in a scattered constellation. In one place two lanterns hung on one mast.

Jeannette felt the pull of the ebbing tide. The ship gave way to it. As it swung, and the monotonous flow of the water became constant, she heard a boat grate, and directly Colonel Fraser came up the vessel's side, and stood on deck where she could touch him. He did not know that the lump of blackness almost beneath his hand was a breathing woman; and if he had known, he would have disregarded her then. But she knew him, from indistinct cap and the white pouch at his girdle to the flat Highland shoes.

Whether the Highlanders on the ship were watching for him to appear as their signal, or he had some private admonition for them, they started up from spots which Jeannette had thought vacant darkness, probably armed and wrapped in their plaids. She did not know what he said to them. One by one they got quickly over the ship's side. She did not form any resolution, and neither did she hesitate; but, drawing tight around her the plaidlike length of shawl which had served her nearly a lifetime, she stood up ready to take her turn.

Jeannette seemed to swallow her heart as she climbed over the rail. The Highlanders were all in the boat except their colonel. He drew in his breath with a startled sound, and she knew the sweep of her skirt must have betrayed her. She expected to fall into the river; but her hand took sure hold of a ladder of rope, and, creeping down backward, she set her foot in the bateau. It was a large and steady open boat. Some of the men were standing. She had entered the bow, and as Colonel Fraser dropped in they cast off, and she sat down, finding a bench as she had found foothold. The Highland officer was beside her. They could not see each other's faces. She was not sure he had detected her. The hardihood which had taken her beyond the French lines in search of on whom she felt under her protection was no longer in her. A cowering woman with a boatload of English soldiers palpitated under the darkness. It was necessary only to steer; both tide and current carried them steadily down. On the surface of the river, lines of dark objects followed. A fleet of the enemy's transports was moving towards Quebec.

To most women country means home. Jeannette was tenaciously fond of the gray old city of Quebec, but home to her was to be near that Highland officer. Her humiliation passed into the very agony of tenderness. To go wherever he was going was enough. She did not want him to speak to her, or touch her, or give any sign that he knew she was in the world. She wanted to sit still by his side under the negation of darkness and be satisfied. Jeannette had never dreamed how long the hours between turn of tide and dawn may be. They were the principal part of her life.

Keen stars held the sky at immeasurable heights. There was no mist. The chill wind had swept the river clear like a great path. Within reach of Jeannette's hand, but hidden from her, as most of us are hidden from one another, sat one more solitary than herself. He had not her robust body. Disease and anxiety had worn him away while he was hopelessly besieging Quebec. In that last hour before the 13th of September dawned, General Wolfe was groping down river toward one of the most desperate military attempts in the history of the world.

There was no sound but the rustle of the water, the stir of a foot as some standing man shifted his weight, and the light click of metal as guns in unsteady hands touched barrels. A voice, modulating rhythm which Jeannette could not understand, began to speak. General Wolfe was reciting an English poem. The strain upon his soul was more than he could bear, and he relieved it by those low-uttered rhymes. Jeannette did not know one word of English. The meaning which reached her was a dirge, but a noble dirge; the death hymn of a human being who has lived up to his capacities. She felt strangely influenced, as by the neighborhood of some large angel, and at the same time the tragedy of being alive overswept her. For one's duty is never all done; or when we have accomplished it with painstaking care, we are smitten through with finding that the greater things have passed us by.

The tide carried the boats near the great wall of rock. Woods made denser shade on the background of night. The cautious murmur of the speaker was cut short.

"Who goes there?" came the sharp challenge of a French sentry.

The soldiers were silent as dead men.

"France!" answered Colonel Fraser in the same language.

"Of what regiment?"

"The Queen's."

The sentry was satisfied. To the Queen's regiment, stationed at Cap Rouge, belonged the duty of convoying provisions down to Quebec. He did not further peril what he believed to be a French transport by asking for the password.

Jeannette breathed. So low had she sunk that she would have used her language herself to get the Highland colonel past danger.

It was fortunate for his general that he had the accent and readiness of a Frenchman. Again they were challenged. They could see another sentry running parallel with their course.

"Provision boats," this time answered the Highlander. "Don't make a noise. The English will hear us."

That hint was enough, for an English sloop of war lay within sound of their voices.

With the swift tide the boats shot around a headland, and here was a cove in the huge precipice, clothed with sere herbage and bushes and a few trees; steep, with the hint of a once-used path across it, but a little less perpendicular than the rest of the rock. No sentinel was stationed at this place.

The world was just beginning to come out of positive shadow into the indistinctness of dawn. Current and tide were so strong that the boats could not be steered directly to shore, but on the alluvial strip at the base of this cove they beached themselves with such success as they could. Twenty-four men sprung out and ran to the ascent. Their muskets were slung upon their backs. A humid look was coming upon the earth, and blurs were over the fading stars. The climbers separated, each making his own way from point to point of the slippery cliff, and swarms followed them as boat after boat discharged its load. The cove by which he breached the stronghold of this continent, and which was from that day to bear his name, cast its shadow on the gaunt, upturned face of Wolfe. He waited while the troops in whom he put his trust, with knotted muscles and panting breasts, lifted themselves to the top. No orders were spoken. Wolfe had issued instructions the night before, and England expected every man to do his duty.

There was not enough light to show how Canada was taken. Jeannette Descheneaux stepped on the sand, and the single thought which took shape in her mind was that she must scale that ascent if the English scaled it.

The hope of escape to her own people did not animate her labor. She had no hope of any sort. She felt only present necessity, which was to climb where the Highland officer climbed. He was in front of her, and took no notice of her until they reached a slippery wall where there were no bushes. There he turned and caught her by the wrist, drawing her up after him. Their faces came near together in the swimming vapors of dawn. He had the bright look of determination. His eyes shone. He was about to burst into the man's arena of glory. The woman, whom he drew up because she was a woman, and because he regretted having taken her prisoner, had the pallid look of a victim. Her tragic black eyes and brows, and the hairs clinging in untidy threads about her haggard cheeks instead of curling up with the damp as the Highlandman's fleece inclined to do, worked an instant's compassion in him. But his business was not the squiring of angular Frenchwomen. Shots were heard at the top of the rock, a trampling rush, and then exulting shouts. The English had taken Vergor's camp.

The hand was gone from Jeannette's wrist,--the hand which gave her such rapture and such pain by its firm fraternal grip. Colonel Fraser leaped to the plain, and was in the midst of the skirmish. Cannon spoke, like thunder rolling across one's head. A battery guarded by the sentinels they had passed was aroused, and must be silenced. The whole face of the cliff suddenly bloomed with scarlet uniforms. All the men remaining in the boats went up as fire sweeps when carried by the wind. Nothing could restrain them. They smelled gunpowder and heard the noise of victory, and would have stormed heaven at that instant. They surrounded Jeannette without seeing her, every man looking up to the heights of glory, and passed her in fierce and panting emulation.

Jeannette leaned against the rough side of Wolfe's Cove. On the inner surface of her eyelids she could see again the image of the Highlandman stooping to help her, his muscular legs and neck showing like a young god's in the early light. There she lost him, for he forgot her. The passion of women whom nature has made unfeminine, and who are too honest to stoop to arts, is one of the tragedies of the world.

Daylight broke reluctantly, with clouds mustering from the inverted deep of the sky. A few drops of rain sprinkled the British uniforms as battalions were formed. The battery which gave the first intimation of danger to the French general, on the other side of Quebec, had been taken and silenced. Wolfe and his officers hurried up the high plateau and chose their ground. Then the troops advanced, marching by files, Highland bagpipes screaming and droning, the earth reverberating with a measured tread. As they moved toward Quebec they wheeled to form their line of battle, in ranks three deep, and stretched across the plain. The city was scarcely a mile away, but a ridge of ground still hid it from sight.

From her hiding-place in one of the empty houses behind Vergor's tents, Jeannette Descheneaux watched the scarlet backs and the tartans of the Highlanders grow smaller. She could also see the prisoners that were taken standing under guard. As for herself, she felt that she had no longer a visible presence, so easy had it been for her to move among swarms of men and escape in darkness. She never had favored her body with soft usage, but it trembled now in every part from muscular strain. She was probably cold and hungry, but her poignant sensation was that she had no friends. It did not matter to Jeannette that history was being made before her, and one of the great battles of the world was about to be fought. It only mattered that she should discern the Fraser plaid as far as eye could follow it. There is no more piteous thing than for one human being to be overpowered by the god in another.

She sat on the ground in the unfloored hut, watching through broken chinking. There was a back door as well as a front door, hung on wooden hinges, and she had pinned the front door as she came in. The opening of the back door made Jeannette turn her head, though with little interest in the comer. It was a boy, with a streak of blood down his face and neck, and his clothes stained by the weather. He had no hat on, and one of his shoes was missing. He put himself at Jeannette's side without any hesitation, and joined her watch through the broken chinking. A tear and a drop of scarlet raced down his cheek, uniting as they dripped from his chin.

"Have you been wounded?" inquired Jeannette.

"It isn't the wound," he answered, "but that Captain Vergor has let them take the heights. I heard something myself, and tried to wake him. The pig turned over and went to sleep again."

"Let me tie it up," said Jeannette.

"He is shot in the heel and taken prisoner. I wish he had been shot in the heart. He hopped out of bed and ran away when the English fired on his tent. I have been trying to get past their lines to run to General Montcalm; but they are everywhere," declared the boy, his chin shaking and his breast swelling with grief.

Jeannette turned her back on him, and found some linen about her person which she could tear. She made a bandage for his head. It comforted her to take hold of the little fellow and part his clotted hair.

"The skin of my head is torn," he admitted, while suffering the attempted surgery. "If I had been taller, the bullet might have killed me; and I would rather be killed than see the English on this rock, marching to take Quebec. What will my father say? I am ashamed to look him in the face and own I slept in the camp of Vergor last night. The Le Moynes and Repentignys never let enemies get past them before. And I knew that man was not keeping watch; he did not set any sentry."

"Is it painful?" she inquired, wiping the bloody cut, which still welled forth along its channel.

The boy lifted his brimming eyes, and answered her from his deeper hurt:--

"I don't know what to do. I think my father would make for General Montcalm's camp if he were alone and could not attack the enemy's rear; for something ought to be done as quickly as possible."

Jeannette bandaged his head, the rain spattering through the broken log house upon them both.

"Who brought you here?" inquired Jacques. "There was nobody in these houses last night, for I searched them myself."

"I hid here before daybreak," she answered briefly.

"But if you knew the English were coming, why did you not give the alarm?"

"I was their prisoner."

"And where will you go now?"

She looked towards the Plains of Abraham and said nothing. The open chink showed Wolfe's six battalions of scarlet lines moving forward or pausing, and the ridge above them thronging with white uniforms.

"If you will trust yourself to me, mamoiselle," proposed Jacques, who considered that it was not the part of a soldier or a gentleman to leave any woman alone in this hut to take the chances of battle, and particularly a woman who had bound up his head, "I will do my best to help you inside the French lines."

The singular woman did not reply to him, but continued looking through the chink. Skirmishers were out. Puffs of smoke from cornfields and knolls showed where Canadians and Indians hid, creeping to the flank of the enemy.

Jacques stooped down himself, and struck his hands together at these sights.

"Monsieur de Montcalm is awake, mademoiselle! And see our sharpshooters picking them off! We can easily run inside the French lines now. These English will soon be tumbled back the way they came up."

In another hour the group of houses was a roaring furnace. A detachment of English light infantry, wheeled to drive out the bushfighters, had lost and retaken it many times, and neither party gave up the ready fortress until it was set on fire. Crumbling red logs hissed in the thin rain, and smoke spread from them across the sodden ground where Wolfe moved. The sick man had become an invincible spirit. He flew along the ranks, waving his sword, the sleeve falling away from his thin arm. The great soldier had thrown himself on this venture without a chance of retreat, but every risk had been thought of and met. He had a battalion guarding the landing. He had a force far in the rear to watch the motions of the French at Cap Rouge. By the arrangement of his front he had taken precautions against being outflanked. And he knew his army was with him to a man. But Montcalm rode up to meet him hampered by insubordinate confusion.

Jeannette Descheneaux, carried along, with the boy, by Canadians and Indians from the English rear to the Côte Ste. Geneviève, lay dazed in the withered grass during the greater part of the action which decided her people's hold on the New World. The ground resounded like a drum with measured treading. The blaze and crash of musketry and cannon blinded and deafened her; but when she lifted her head from the shock of the first charge, the most instantaneous and shameful panic that ever seized a French army had already begun. The skirmishers in the bushes could not understand it. Smoke parted, and she saw the white-and-gold French general trying to drive his men back. But they evaded the horses of officers.

Jacques rose, with the Canadians and Indians, to his knees. He had a musket. Jeannette rose, also, as the Highlanders came sweeping on in pursuit. She had scarcely been a woman to the bushfighters. They were too eager in their aim to glance aside at a rawboned camp follower in a wet shawl. Neither did the Highlanders distinguish from other Canadian heads the one with a woman's braids and a faint shadowing of hair at the corners of the mouth. They came on without suspecting an ambush, and she heard their strange cries--"Cath-Shairm!" and "Caisteal Duna!"--when the shock of a volley stopped the streaming tartans. She saw the play of surprise and fury in those mountaineer faces. They threw down their muskets, and turned on the ambushed Canadians, short sword in hand.

Never did knight receive the blow of the accolade as that crouching woman took a Highland knife in her breast. For one breath she grasped the back of it with both hands, and her rapt eyes met the horrified eyes of Colonel Fraser. He withdrew the weapon, standing defenseless, and a ball struck him, cutting the blood across his arm, and again he was lost in the fury of battle, while Jeannette felt herself dragged down the slope.

She resisted. She heard a boy's voice pleading with her, but she got up and tried to go back to the spot from which she had been dragged. The Canadians and Indians were holding their ground. She heard their muskets, but they were far behind her, and the great rout caught her and whirled her. Officers on their horses were borne struggling along in it. She fell down and was trampled on, but something helped her up.

The flood of men poured along the front of the ramparts and down to the bridge of boats on the St. Charles, or into the city walls through the St. Louis and St. John gates.

To Jeannette the world was far away. Yet she found it once more close at hand, as she stood with her back against the lofty inner wall. The mad crowd had passed, and gone shouting down the narrow streets. But the St. Louis gate was still choked with fugitives when Montcalm appeared, reeling on his horse, supported by a soldier on each side. His white uniform was stained on the breast, and blood dripped from the saddle. Jeannette heard the piercing cry of a little girl: "Oh heavens! Oh heavens! The marquis is killed!" And she heard the fainting general gasp, "It is nothing, it is nothing. Don't be troubled for me, my children."

She knew how he felt as he was led by. The indistinctness of the opposite wall, which widened from the gate, was astonishing. And she was troubled by the same little boy whose head she had tied up in the log house. Jeannette looked obliquely down at him as she braced herself with chill fingers, and discerned that he was claimed by a weeping little girl to whom he yet paid no attention.

"Let me help you, mademoiselle," he urged, troubling her.

"Go away," said Jeannette.

"But, mademoiselle, you have been badly hurt."

"Go away," said Jeannette, and her limbs began to settle. She thought of smiling at the children, but her features were already cast. The English child held her on one side, and the French child on the other, as she collapsed in a sitting posture. Tender nuns, going from friend to foe, would find this stoical face against the wall. It was no strange sight then. Canada was taken.

Men with bloody faces were already running with barricades for the gates. Wailing for Montcalm could be heard.

The boy put his arm abound the girl and turned her eyes away. They ran together up towards the citadel: England and France with their hands locked; young Canada weeping, but having a future.

THE WINDIGO.

The cry of those rapids in Ste. Marie's River called the Sault could be heard at all hours through the settlement on the rising shore and into the forest beyond. Three quarters of a mile of frothing billows, like some colossal instrument, never ceased playing music down an inclined channel until the trance of winter locked it up. At August dusk, when all that shaggy world was sinking to darkness, the gushing monotone became very distinct.

Louizon Cadotte and his father's young seignior, Jacques de Repentigny, stepped from a birch canoe on the bank near the fort, two Chippewa Indians following with their game. Hunting furnished no small addition to the food supply of the settlement, for the English conquest had brought about scarcity at this as well as other Western posts. Peace was declared in Europe; but soldiers on the frontier, waiting orders to march out at any time, were not abundantly supplied with stores, and they let season after season go by, reluctant to put in harvests which might be reaped by their successors.

Jacques was barely nineteen, and Louizon was considerably older. But the Repentignys had gone back to France after the fall of Quebec; and five years of European life had matured the young seignior as decades of border experience would never mature his half-breed tenant. Yet Louizon was a fine dark-skinned fellow, well made for one of short stature. He trod close by his tall superior with visible fondness; enjoying this spectacle of a man the like of whom he had not seen on the frontier.

Jacques looked back, as he walked, at the long zigzag shadows on the river. Forest fire in the distance showed a leaning column, black at base, pearl-colored in the primrose air, like smoke from some gigantic altar. He had seen islands in the lake under which the sky seemed to slip, throwing them above the horizon in mirage, and trees standing like detached bushes on a world rim of water. The Ste. Marie River was a beautiful light green in color, and sunset and twilight played upon it all the miracles of change.

"I wish my father had never left this country," said young Repentigny, feeling that spell cast by the wilderness. "Here is his place. He should have withdrawn to the Sault, and accommodated himself to the English, instead of returning to France. The service in other parts of the world does not suit him. Plenty of good men have held to Canada and their honor also."

"Yes, yes," assented Louizon. "The English cannot be got rid of. For my part, I shall be glad when this post changes hands. I am sick of our officers."

He scowled with open resentment. The seigniory house faced the parade ground, and they could see against its large low mass, lounging on the gallery, one each side of a window, the white uniforms of two French soldiers. The window sashes, screened by small curtains across the middle, were swung into the room; and Louizon's wife leaned on her elbows across the sill, the rosy atmosphere of his own fire projecting to view every ring of her bewitching hair, and even her long eyelashes as she turned her gaze from side to side.

It was so dark, and the object of their regard was so bright, that these buzzing bees of Frenchmen did not see her husband until he ran up the steps facing them. Both of them greeted him heartily. He felt it a peculiar indignity that his wife's danglers forever passed their good-will on to him; and he left them in the common hall, with his father and the young seignior, and the two or three Indians who congregated there every evening to ask for presents or to smoke.

Louizon's wife met him in the middle of the broad low apartment where he had been so proud to introduce her as a bride, and turned her cheek to be kissed. She was not fond of having her lips touched. Her hazel-colored hair was perfumed. She was so supple and exquisite, so dimpled and aggravating, that the Chippewa in him longed to take her by the scalp-lock of her light head; but the Frenchman bestowed the salute. Louizon had married the prettiest woman in the settlement. Life overflowed in her, so that her presence spread animation. Both men and women paid homage to her. Her very mother-in-law was her slave. And this was the stranger spectacle because Madame Cadotte the senior, though born a Chippewa, did not easily make herself subservient to anybody.

The time had been when Louizon was proud of any notice this siren conferred on him. But so exacting and tyrannical is the nature of man that when he got her he wanted to keep her entirely to himself. From his Chippewa mother, who, though treated with deference, had never dared to disobey his father, he inherited a fond and jealous nature; and his beautiful wife chafed it. Young Repentigny saw that she was like a Parisian. But Louizon felt that she was a spirit too fine and tantalizing for him to grasp, and she had him in her power.

He hung his powderhorn behind the door, and stepped upon a stool to put his gun on its rack above the fireplace. The fire showed his round figure, short but well muscled, and the boyish petulance of his shaven lip. The sun shone hot upon the Sault of an August noon, but morning and night were cool, and a blaze was usually kept in the chimney.

"You found plenty of game?" said his wife; and it was one of this woman's wickedest charms that she could be so interested in her companion of the moment.

"Yes," he answered, scowling more, and thinking of the brace on the gallery whom he had not shot, but wished to.

She laughed at him.

"Archange Cadotte," said Louizon, turning around on the stool before he descended; and she spread out her skirts, taking two dancing steps to indicate that she heard him. "How long am I to be mortified by your conduct to Monsieur de Repentigny?"

"Oh--Monsieur de Repentigny. It is now that boy from France, at whom I have never looked."

"The man I would have you look at, madame, you scarcely notice."

"Why should I notice him? He pays little attention to me."

"Ah, he is not one of your danglers, madame. He would not look at another man's wife. He has had trouble himself."

"So will you have if you scorch the backs of your legs," observed Archange.

Louizon stood obstinately on the stool and ignored the heat. He was in the act of stepping down, but he checked it as she spoke.

"Monsieur de Repentigny came back to this country to marry a young English lady of Quebec. He thinks of her, not of you."

"I am sure he is welcome," murmured Archange. "But it seems the young English lady prefers to stay in Quebec."

"She never looked at any other man, madame. She is dead."

"No wonder. I should be dead, too, if I had looked at one stupid man all my life."

Louizon's eyes sparkled. "Madame, I will have you know that the seignior of Sault Ste. Marie is entitled to your homage."

"Monsieur, I will have you know that I do not pay homage to any man."

"You, Archange Cadotte? You are in love with a new man every day."

"Not in the least, monsieur. I only desire to have a new man in love with me every day."

Her mischievous mouth was a scarlet button in her face, and Louizon leaped to the floor, and kicked the stool across the room.

"The devil himself is no match at all for you!"

"But I married him before I knew that," returned Archange; and Louizon grinned in his wrath.

"I don't like such women."

"Oh yes, you do. Men always like women whom they cannot chain."

"I have never tried to chain you." Her husband approached, shaking his finger at her. "There is not another woman in the settlement who has her way as you have. And see how you treat me!"

"How do I treat you?" inquired Archange, sitting down and resigning herself to statistics.

"Ste. Marie! St. Joseph!" shouted the Frenchman. "How does she treat me! And every man in the seigniory dangling at her apron string!"

"You are mistaken. There is the young seignior; and there is the new English commandant, who must be now within the seigniory, for they expect him at the post to-morrow morning. It is all the same: if I look at a man you are furious, and if I refuse to look at him you are more furious still."

Louizon felt that inward breaking up which proved to him that he could not stand before the tongue of this woman. Groping for expression, he declared,--

"If thou wert sickly or blind, I would be just as good to thee as when thou wert a bride. I am not the kind that changes if a woman loses her fine looks."

"No doubt you would like to see me with the smallpox," suggested Archange. "But it is never best to try a man too far."

"You try me too far,--let me tell you that. But you shall try me no further."

The Indian appeared distinctly on his softer French features, as one picture may be stamped over another.

"Smoke a pipe, Louizon," urged the thorn in his flesh. "You are always so much more agreeable when your mouth is stopped."

But he left the room without looking at her again. Archange remarked to herself that he would be better natured when his mother had given him his supper; and she yawned, smiling at the maladroit creatures whom she made her sport. Her husband was the best young man in the settlement. She was entirely satisfied with him, and grateful to him for taking the orphan niece of a poor post commandant, without prospects since the conquest, and giving her sumptuous quarters and comparative wealth; but she could not forbear amusing herself with his masculine weaknesses.

Archange was by no means a slave in the frontier household. She did not spin, or draw water, or tend the oven. Her mother-in-law, Madame Cadotte, had a hold on perennially destitute Chippewa women who could be made to work for longer or shorter periods in a Frenchman's kitchen or loom-house instead of with savage implements. Archange's bed had ruffled curtains, and her pretty dresses, carefully folded, filled a large chest.

She returned to the high window sill, and watched the purple distances growing black. She could smell the tobacco the men were smoking in the open hall, and hear their voices. Archange knew what her mother-in-law was giving the young seignior and Louizon for their supper. She could fancy the officers laying down their pipes to draw to the board, also, for the Cadottes kept open house all the year round.

The thump of the Indian drum was added to the deep melody of the rapids. There were always a few lodges of Chippewas about the Sault. When the trapping season and the maple-sugar making were over and his profits drunk up, time was the largest possession of an Indian. He spent it around the door of his French brother, ready to fish or to drink whenever invited. If no one cared to go on the river, he turned to his hereditary amusements. Every night that the rapids were void of torches showing where the canoes of white fishers darted, the thump of the Indian drum and the yell of Indian dancers could be heard.

Archange's mind was running on the new English garrison who were said to be so near taking possession of the picketed fort, when she saw something red on the parade ground. The figure stood erect and motionless, gathering all the remaining light on its indistinct coloring, and Archange's heart gave a leap at the hint of a military man in a red uniform. She was all alive, like a whitefisher casting the net or a hunter sighting game. It was Archange's nature, without even taking thought, to turn her head on her round neck so that the illuminated curls would show against a background of wall, and wreathe her half-bare arms across the sill. To be looked at, to lure and tantalize, was more than pastime. It was a woman's chief privilege. Archange held the secret conviction that the priest himself could be made to give her lighter penances by an angelic expression she could assume. It is convenient to have large brown eyes and the trick of casting them sidewise in sweet distress.

But the Chippewa widow came in earlier than usual that evening, being anxious to go back to the lodges to watch the dancing. Archange pushed the sashes shut, ready for other diversion, and Michel Pensonneau never failed to furnish her that. The little boy was at the widow's heels. Michel was an orphan.

"If Archange had children," Madame Cadotte had said to Louizon, "she would not seek other amusement. Take the little Pensonneau lad that his grandmother can hardly feed. He will give Archange something to do."

So Louizon brought home the little Pensonneau lad. Archange looked at him, and considered that here was another person to wait on her. As to keeping him clean and making clothes for him, they might as well have expected her to train the sledge dogs. She made him serve her, but for mothering he had to go to Madame Cadotte. Yet Archange far outweighed Madame Cadotte with him. The labors put upon him by the autocrat of the house were sweeter than mococks full of maple sugar from the hand of the Chippewa housekeeper. At first Archange would not let him come into her room. She dictated to him through door or window. But when he grew fat with good food and was decently clad under Madame Cadotte's hand, the great promotion of entering that sacred apartment was allowed him. Michel came in whenever he could. It was his nightly habit to follow the Chippewa widow there after supper, and watch her brush Archange's hair.

Michel stood at the end of the hearth with a roll of pagessanung or plum-leather in his fist. His cheeks had a hard garnered redness like polished apples. The Chippewa widow set her husband carefully against the wall. The husband was a bundle about two feet long, containing her best clothes tied up in her dead warrior's sashes and rolled in a piece of cloth. His armbands and his necklace of bear's-claws appeared at the top as a grotesque head. This bundle the widow was obliged to carry with her everywhere. To be seen without it was a disgrace, until that time when her husband's nearest relations should take it away from her and give her new clothes, thus signifying that she had mourned long enough to satisfy them. As the husband's relations were unable to cover themselves, the prospect of her release seemed distant. For her food she was glad to depend on her labor in the Cadotte household. There was no hunter to supply her lodge now.

The widow let down Archange's hair and began to brush it. The long mass was too much for its owner to handle. It spread around her like a garment, as she sat on her chair, and its ends touched the floor. Michel thought there was nothing more wonderful in the world than this glory of hair, its rings and ripples shining in the firelight. The widow's jaws worked in unobtrusive rumination on a piece of pleasantly bitter fungus, the Indian substitute for quinine, which the Chippewas called waubudone. As she consoled herself much with this medicine, and her many-syllabled name was hard to pronounce, Archange called her Waubudone, an offense against her dignity which the widow might not have endured from anybody else, though she bore it without a word from this soft-haired magnate.

As she carefully carded the mass of hair lock by lock, thinking it an unnecessary nightly labor, the restless head under her hands was turned towards the portable husband. Archange had not much imagination, but to her the thing was uncanny. She repeated what she said every night:--

"Do stand him in the hall and let him smell the smoke, Waubudone."

"No," refused the widow.

"But I don't want him in my bedroom. You are not obliged to keep that thing in your sight all the time."

"Yes," said the widow.

A dialect of mingled French and Chippewa was what they spoke, and Michel knew enough of both tongues to follow the talk.

"Are they never going to take him from you? If they don't take him from you soon, I shall go to the lodges and speak to his people about it myself."

The Chippewa widow usually passed over this threat in silence; but, threading a lock with the comb, she now said,--

"Best not go to the lodges awhile."

"Why?" inquired Archange. "Have the English already arrived? Is the tribe dissatisfied?"

"Don't know that."

"Then why should I not go to the lodges?"

"Windigo at the Sault now."

Archange wheeled to look at her face. The widow was unmoved. She was little older than Archange, but her features showed a stoical harshness in the firelight. Michel, who often went to the lodges, widened his mouth and forgot to fill it with plum-leather. There was no sweet which Michel loved as he did this confection of wild plums and maple sugar boiled down and spread on sheets of birch bark. Madame Cadotte made the best pagessanung at the Sault.

"Look at the boy," laughed Archange. "He will not want to go to the lodges any more after dark."

The widow remarked, noting Michel's fat legs and arms,--