She knew how he felt as he was led by.  The indistinctness of the opposite wall, which widened from the gate, was astonishing.  And she was troubled by the same little boy whose head she had tied up in the log house.  Jeannette looked obliquely down at him as she braced herself with chill fingers, and discerned that he was claimed by a weeping little girl to whom he yet paid no attention.

“Let me help you, mademoiselle,” he urged, troubling her.

“Go away,” said Jeannette.

“But, mademoiselle, you have been badly hurt.”

“Go away,” said Jeannette, and her limbs began to settle.  She thought of smiling at the children, but her features were already cast.  The English child held her on one side, and the French child on the other, as she collapsed in a sitting posture.  Tender nuns, going from friend to foe, would find this stoical face against the wall.  It was no strange sight then.  Canada was taken.

Men with bloody faces were already running with barricades for the gates.  Wailing for Montcalm could be heard.

The boy put his arm abound the girl and turned her eyes away.  They ran together up towards the citadel:  England and France with their hands locked; young Canada weeping, but having a future.

THE WINDIGO.

The cry of those rapids in Ste. Marie’s River called the Sault could be heard at all hours through the settlement on the rising shore and into the forest beyond.  Three quarters of a mile of frothing billows, like some colossal instrument, never ceased playing music down an inclined channel until the trance of winter locked it up.  At August dusk, when all that shaggy world was sinking to darkness, the gushing monotone became very distinct.

Louizon Cadotte and his father’s young seignior, Jacques de Repentigny, stepped from a birch canoe on the bank near the fort, two Chippewa Indians following with their game.  Hunting furnished no small addition to the food supply of the settlement, for the English conquest had brought about scarcity at this as well as other Western posts.  Peace was declared in Europe; but soldiers on the frontier, waiting orders to march out at any time, were not abundantly supplied with stores, and they let season after season go by, reluctant to put in harvests which might be reaped by their successors.

Jacques was barely nineteen, and Louizon was considerably older.  But the Repentignys had gone back to France after the fall of Quebec; and five years of European life had matured the young seignior as decades of border experience would never mature his half-breed tenant.  Yet Louizon was a fine dark-skinned fellow, well made for one of short stature.  He trod close by his tall superior with visible fondness; enjoying this spectacle of a man the like of whom he had not seen on the frontier.