Gaspard also went out.  When the governor sat in his armchair, and his seignior lay on the bed, and Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene was stretched that way on the floor, it could hardly be decent for an old habitant to stand by, even cap in hand.  Yet he could scarcely take his eyes from the familiar face as it changed in phosphorescent light.  The features lifted themselves with firm nobility, expressing an archangel’s beauty.  Sainte-Helene’s lips parted, and above the patter of the reciting Recollet the watchers were startled by one note like the sigh of a wind-harp.

The Montreal militia, the Lorette Hurons, and Beauport men were still thronging about, overflowing laterally upon the other farms.  They demanded word of the young seignior, hushing their voices.  Some of them had gone into Gaspard’s milk cave and handed out stale milk for their own and their neighbors’ refreshment.  A group were sitting on the crisp ground, with a lantern in their midst, playing some game; their heads and shoulders moving with an alacrity objectless to observers, so closely was the light hemmed in.

Gaspard reached his gateway with the certainty of custom.  He looked off at both ends of the world.  The starlit stretch of road was almost as deserted as when Quebec shut in the inhabitants of Beauport.  From the direction of Montmorenci he saw a gray thing come loping down, showing eyes and tongue of red fire.  He screamed an old man’s scream, pointing to it, and the cry of “Loup-garou!” brought all Beauport men to their feet.  The flints clicked.  It was a time of alarms.  Two shots were fired together, and an under officer sprung across the fence of a neighboring farm to take command of the threatened action.

The camp of sturdy New Englanders on the St. Charles was hid by a swell in the land.  At the outcry, those Frenchmen around the lantern parted company, some recoiling backwards, and others scrambling to seize their guns.  But one caught up the lantern, and ran to the struggling beast in the road.

Gaspard pushed into the gathering crowd, and craned himself to see the thing, also.  He saw a gaunt dog, searching yet from face to face for some lost idol, and beating the flinty world with a last thump of propitiation.

Frontenac opened the door and stood upon the doorstep.  His head almost reached the overhanging straw thatch.

“What is the alarm, my men?”

“Your excellency,” the subaltern answered, “it was nothing but a dog.  It came down from Montmorenci, and some of the men shot it.”

“Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene,” declared Frontenac, lowering his plumed hat, “has just died for New France.”

* * * * *