Robert was silent, and the partisan did not ask him any further questions, but, being much disturbed, sent into the forest scouts, who returned presently, unable to find anything.

“It may or it may not have been a message,” he said, speaking to Robert, in his usual garrulous fashion, “but I still incline to the opinion that it was, though I may never know what the message meant, but I, Charles Langlade, have not been called the Owl for nothing.  If it refers to you then your chance of escape has not increased.  I hold you merely for tonight, but I hold you tight and fast.  Tomorrow my responsibility ceases, and you march in the middle of Montcalm’s army.”

Robert made no reply, but he was in wonderful spirits, and his elation endured.  His senses, in truth, were so soothed by the visible evidence that his comrade was near that he fell asleep very soon and had no dreams.  The French and Indian army began its march early the next morning, and Robert found himself with about a dozen other prisoners, settlers who had been swept up in its advance.  They had been surprised in their cabins, or their fields, newly cleared, and could tell him nothing, but he noticed that the march was west.

He believed they were not far from Lake Ontario, and he had no doubt that Montcalm had prepared some fell stroke.  His mind settled at last upon Oswego, where the Anglo-American forces had a post supposed to be strong, and he was smitten with a fierce and commanding desire to escape and take a warning.  But he was compelled to eat his heart out without result.  With French and Indians all about him he had not the remotest chance and, helpless, he was compelled to watch the Marquis de Montcalm march to what he felt was going to be a French triumph.

Swarms of Indian scouts and skirmishers preceded the army and Canadian axmen cut a way for the artillery, but to Robert’s great amazement these operations lasted only a short time.  Almost before he could realize it they had emerged from the deep woods and he looked again upon the vast, shining reaches of Lake Ontario.  Then he learned for the first time that Montcalm’s army had come mostly in boats and in detachments, and was now united for attack.  As he had surmised, Oswego, which the English and Americans had intended to be a great stronghold and rallying place in the west, was the menaced position.

Robert from a hill saw three forts before the French force, the largest standing upon a plateau of considerable elevation on the east bank of the river, which there flowed into the lake.  It was shaped like a star, and the fortifications consisted of trunks of trees, sharpened at the ends, driven deep into the ground, and set as close together as possible.  On the west side of the river was another fort of stone and clay, and four hundred yards beyond it was an unfinished stockade, so weak that its own garrison had named it in derision Rascal Fort.  Some flat boats and canoes lay in the lake, and it was a man in one of these canoes who had been the first to learn of the approach of Montcalm’s army, so slender had been the precautions taken by the officers in command of the forts.