Both Amos and De Catinat looked with the deepest curiosity and interest at the famous leader of coureurs-de-bois, a man whose whole life had been spent in pushing westward, ever westward, saying little, writing nothing, but always the first wherever there was danger to meet or difficulty to overcome.  It was not religion and it was not hope of gain which led him away into those western wildernesses, but pure love of nature and of adventure, with so little ambition that he had never cared to describe his own travels, and none knew where he had been or where he had stopped.  For years he would vanish from the settlements away into the vast plains of the Dacotah, or into the huge wilderness of the north-west, and then at last some day would walk back into Sault La Marie, or any other outpost of civilisation, a little leaner, a little browner, and as taciturn as ever.  Indians from the furthest corners of the continent knew him as they knew their own sachem.  He could raise tribes and bring a thousand painted cannibals to the help of the French who spoke a tongue which none knew, and came from the shores of rivers which no one else had visited.  The most daring French explorers, when, after a thousand dangers, they had reached some country which they believed to be new, were as likely as not to find Du Lhut sitting by his camp fire there, some new squaw by his side, and his pipe between his teeth.  Or again, when in doubt and danger, with no friends within a thousand miles, the traveller might suddenly meet this silent man, with one or two tattered wanderers of his own kidney, who would help him from his peril, and then vanish as unexpectedly as he came.  Such was the man who now walked by their sides along the bank of the Richelieu, and both Amos and De Catinat knew that his presence there had a sinister meaning, and that the place which Greysolon du Lhut had chosen was the place where the danger threatened.

“What do you think of those fires over yonder, Du Lhut?” asked young De la Noue.

The adventurer was stuffing his pipe with rank Indian tobacco, which he pared from a plug with a scalping knife.  He glanced over at the two little plumes of smoke which stood straight up against the red evening sky.

“I don’t like them,” said he.

“They are Iroquois then?”

“Yes.”

“Well, at least it proves that they are on the other side of the river.”

“It proves that they are on this side.”

“What!”

Du Lhut lit his pipe from a tinder paper.  “The Iroquois are on this side,” said he.  “They crossed to the south of us.”

“And you never told us.  How do you know that they crossed, and why did you not tell us?”

“I did not know until I saw the fires over yonder.”

“And how did they tell you?”

“Tut, an Indian papoose could have told,” said Du Lhut impatiently.  “Iroquois on the trail do nothing without an object.  They have an object then in showing that smoke.  If their war-parties were over yonder there would be no object.  Therefore their braves must have crossed the river.  And they could not get over to the north without being seen from the fort.  They have got over on the south then.”