Gaspard stayed out on his river front until he felt half frozen.  The old habitant had not been so disturbed and uncomfortable since his family died of smallpox.  Phips’s vessels lay near the point of Orleans Island, a few portholes lighting their mass of gloom, while two red lanterns aloft burned like baleful eyes at the lost coast of Canada.  Nothing else showed on the river.  The distant wall of Levis palisades could be discerned, and Quebec stood a mighty crown, its gems all sparkling.  Behind Gaspard, Beauport was alive.  The siege was virtually over, and he had not set foot off his farm during Phips’s invasion of New France.  He did not mind sleeping on the floor, with his heels to the fire.  But there were displacements and changes and sorrows which he did mind.

“However,” muttered the old man, and it was some comfort to the vague aching in his breast to formulate one fact as solid as the heights around, “it is certain that there are loups-garous.”

THE MILL AT PETIT CAP

August night air, sweet with a half salt breath from the St. Lawrence, met the miller of San Joachim as he looked out; but he bolted the single thick door of the mill, and cast across it into a staple a hook as long as his body and as thick as his arm.  At any alarm in the village he must undo these fastenings, and receive the refugees from Montgomery; yet he could not sleep without locking the door.  So all that summer he had slept on a bench in the mill basement, to be ready for the call.

All the parishes on the island of Orleans, and on each side of the river, quite to Montmorenci Falls, where Wolfe’s army was encamped, had been sacked by that evil man, Captain Alexander Montgomery, whom the English general himself could hardly restrain.  San Joachim du Petit Cap need not hope to escape.  It was really Wolfe’s policy to harry the country which in that despairing summer of 1759 he saw no chance of conquering.

The mill was grinding with a shuddering noise which covered all country night sounds.  But so accustomed was the miller to this lullaby that he fell asleep on his chaff cushion directly, without his usual review of the trouble betwixt La Vigne and himself.  He was sensitive to his neighbors’ claims, and the state of the country troubled him, but he knew he could endure La Vigne’s misfortunes better than any other man’s.

Loopholes in the hoary stone walls of the basement were carefully covered, but a burning dip on the hearth betrayed them within.  There was a deep blackened oven built at right angles to the fireplace in the south wall.  The stairway rose like a giant’s ladder to the vast dimness overhead.  No other such fortress-mill was to be found between Cap Tourmente and the citadel, or indeed anywhere on the St. Lawrence.  It had been built not many years before by the Seminaire priests of Quebec for the protection and nourishment of their seigniory, that huge grant of rich land stretching from Beaupre to Cap Tourmente, bequeathed to the church by the first bishop of Canada.