But nothing except noise was attempted at Beauport.  Jacques was so weary, as he toiled back uphill in diminishing light, that he gratefully crawled upon a cart and lay still, letting it take him wherever the carter might be going.  There were not enough horses and oxen in Canada to move the supplies for the army from Montreal to Quebec by land.  Transports had to slip down the St. Lawrence by night, running a gauntlet of vigilant English vessels.  Yet whenever the intendant Bigot wanted to shift anything, he did not lack oxen or wheels.  Jacques did not talk to the carter, but he knew a load of king’s provisions was going out to some favorite of the intendant’s who had been set to guard the northern heights.  The stealings of this popular civil officer were common talk in Quebec.

That long slope called the Plains of Abraham, which swept away from the summit of the rock toward Cap Rouge, seemed very near the sky.  Jacques watched dusk envelop this place.  Patches of faded herbage and stripped corn, and a few trees only, broke the monotony of its extent.  On the north side, overhanging the winding valley of the St. Charles, the rock’s great shoulder was called Cote Ste. Genevieve.  The bald plain was about a mile wide, but the cart jogged a mile and a half from Quebec before it reached the tents where its freight was to be discharged.

Habit had taken the young Repentigny daily to his father’s camp, but this was the first time he had seen the guard along the heights.  Montcalm’s soldiers knew him.  He was permitted to handle arms.  Many a boy of fifteen was then in the ranks, and children of his age were growing used to war.  His father called it his apprenticeship to the trade.  A few empty houses stood some distance back of the tents; and farther along the precipice, beyond brush and trees, other guards were posted.  Seventy men and four cannon completed the defensive line which Montcalm had drawn around the top of the rock.  Half the number could have kept it, by vigilance.  And it was evident that the officer in charge thought so, and was taking advantage of his general’s bounty.

“Remember I am sending you to my field as well as to your own,” the boy overheard him say.  Nearly all his company were gathered in a little mob before his tent.  He sat there on a camp stool.  They were Canadians from Lorette, anxious for leave of absence, and full of promises.

“Yes, monsieur, we will remember your field.”  “Yes, Captain Vergor, your grain as soon as we have gathered ours in.”  “It shall be done, captain.”

Jacques had heard of Vergor.  A few years before, Vergor had been put under arrest for giving up Fort Beausejour, in Acadia, to the English without firing a shot.  The boy thought it strange that such a man should be put in charge of any part of the defensive cordon around Quebec.  But Vergor had a friend in the intendant Bigot, who knew how to reinstate his disgraced favorites.  The arriving cart drew the captain’s attention from his departing men.  He smiled, his depressed nose and fleshy lips being entirely good-natured.