Savage feastings, riotings and drunkenness, and long debaucheries came with the Great Peace, when once the word had gone out that the fur trade was to be resumed.  Henceforth there was to be peace.  The French were no longer to raid the little cabins along the Kennebec and the Penobscot.  The river Richelieu was to be no longer a red war trail.  The English were no longer to offer arms and blankets for the beaver, belonging by right of prior discovery to those who offered French brandy and French beads.  The Iroquois were no longer to pursue a timid foe across the great prairies of the valley of the Messasebe.  The Ojibways were not to ambush the scattered parties of the Iroquois.  The unambitious colonists of New England and New York were to be left to till their stony farms in quiet.  Meantime, the fur trade, wasteful, licentious, unprofitable, was to extend onward and outward in all the marches of the West.  From one end of the Great River of the West to the other the insignia of France and of France’s king were to be erected, and France’s posts were to hold all the ancient trails.  Even at the mouth of the Great River, forestalling these sullen English and these sluggish English colonists, far to the south in the somber forests and miasmatic marshes, there was to be established one more ruling point for the arms of Louis the Grand.  It was a great game this, for which the continent of America was in preparation.  It was a mighty thing, this gathering of the Great Peace, this time when colonists and their king were seeing the first breaking of the wave on the shore of an empire alluring, wonderful, unparalleled.

Into this wild rabble of savages and citizens, of priest and soldier and coureur, Law’s friends, Pierre Noir and Jean Breboeuf, swiftly disappeared, naturally, fitly and unavoidably.  “The West is calling to us, Monsieur,” said Pierre Noir one morning, as he stood looking out across the river.  “I hear once more the spirits of the Messasebe.  Monsieur, will you come?”

Law shook his head.  Yet two days later, as he stood at that very point, there came to him the silent feet of two coureurs instead of one.  Once more he heard in his ear the question:  “Monsieur L’as, will you come?”

At this voice he started.  In an instant his arms were about the neck of Du Mesne, and tears were falling from the eyes of both in the welcome of that brotherhood which is admitted only by those who have known together arms and danger and hardship, the touch of the hard ground and the sight of the wide blue sky.

“Du Mesne, my friend!”

“Monsieur L’as!”

“It is as though you came from the depths of the sea, Du Mesne!” said Law.

“And as though you yourself arose from the grave, Monsieur!”

“How did you know—?”