“A load of provisions, and a recruit for my company,” he said.

“Monsieur the captain needs recruits,” observed Jacques.

“Society is what I need most,” said Vergor.  “And from appearances I am going to have it at my supper which the cook is about to set before me.”

“I think I will stay all night here,” said Jacques.

“You overwhelm me,” responded Vergor.

“There are so many empty tents.”

“Fill as many of them as you can,” suggested Vergor.  “You are doubtless much away from your mother, inspecting the troops; but what will madame say if you fail to answer at her roll call to-night?”

“Nothing.  I should be in my father’s tent at Montreal, if she had been able to go when he was ordered back there.”

“Who is your father?”

“Le Gardeur de Repentigny.”

Vergor drew his lips together for a soft whistle, as he rose to direct the storing of his goods.

“It is a young general with whom I am to have the honor of messing.  I thought he had the air of camps and courts the moment I saw his head over the side of the cart.”

Many a boy secretly despises the man to whose merry insolence he submits.  But the young Repentigny felt for Vergor such contempt as only an incompetent officer inspires.

No sentinels were stationed.  The few soldiers remaining busied themselves over their mess fires.  Jacques looked down a cove not quite as steep as the rest of the cliff, yet as nearly perpendicular as any surface on which trees and bushes can take hold.  It was clothed with a thick growth of sere weeds, cut by one hint of a diagonal line.  Perhaps laborers at a fulling mill now rotting below had once climbed this rock.  Rain had carried the earth from above in small cataracts down its face, making a thin alluvial coating.  A strip of land separated the rock from the St. Lawrence, which looked wide and gray in the evening light.  Showers raked the far-off opposite hills.  Leaves showing scarlet or orange were dulled by flying mist.

The boy noticed more boats drifting up river on the tide than he had counted in Quebec Basin.

“Where are all the vessels going?” he asked the nearest soldier.

“Nowhere.  They only move back and forth with the tide.”

“But they are English ships.  Why don’t you fire on them?”

“We have no orders.  And besides, our own transports have to slip down among them at night.  One is pretty careful not to knock the bottom out of the dish which carries his meat.”

“The English might land down there some dark night.”

“They may land; but, unfortunately for themselves, they have no wings.”

The boy did not answer, but he thought, “If my father and General
Levis were posted here, wings would be of no use to the English.”