“It is a dangerous road,” said De Catinat, who understood the conversation of his companions, even when he was unable to join in it.  “We should need to skirt the country of the Mohawks.”

“It’s the only way, I guess.  It’s that or nothing.”

“And I have a friend upon the Richelieu River who, I am sure, would help us on our way,” said De Catinat with a smile.  “Adele, you have heard me talk of Charles de la Noue, seigneur de Sainte Marie?”

“He whom you used to call the Canadian duke, Amory?”

“Precisely.  His seigneury lies on the Richelieu, a little south of Fort St. Louis, and I am sure that he would speed us upon our way.”

“Good!” cried Amos.  “If we have a friend there we shall do well.  That clenches it then, and we shall hold fast by the river.  Let’s get to our paddles then, for that friar will make mischief for us if he can.”

And so for a long week the little party toiled up the great waterway, keeping ever to the southern bank, where there were fewer clearings.  On both sides of the stream the woods were thick, but every here and there they would curve away, and a narrow strip of cultivated land would skirt the bank, with the yellow stubble to mark where the wheat had grown.  Adele looked with interest at the wooden houses with their jutting stories and quaint gable-ends, at the solid, stone-built manor-houses of the seigneurs, and at the mills in every hamlet, which served the double purpose of grinding flour and of a loop-holed place of retreat in case of attack.  Horrible experience had taught the Canadians what the English settlers had yet to learn, that in a land of savages it is a folly to place isolated farmhouses in the centre of their own fields.  The clearings then radiated out from the villages, and every cottage was built with an eye to the military necessities of the whole, so that the defence might make a stand at all points, and might finally centre upon the stone manor-house and the mill.  Now at every bluff and hill near the villages might be seen the gleam of the muskets of the watchers, for it was known that the scalping parties of the Five Nations were out, and none could tell where the blow would fall, save that it must come where they were least prepared to meet it.

Indeed, at every step in this country, whether the traveller were on the St. Lawrence, or west upon the lakes, or down upon the banks of the Mississippi, or south in the country of the Cherokees and of the Creeks, he would still find the inhabitants in the same state of dreadful expectancy, and from the same cause.  The Iroquois, as they were named by the French, or the Five Nations as they called themselves, hung like a cloud over the whole great continent.  Their confederation was a natural one, for they were of the same stock and spoke the same language, and all attempts to separate them had been in vain.  Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Senecas were each proud of their own totems and their own