and emeralds taken in handfuls from this same blue earth?  Ah, bah! gentlemen, Europe for you if ye like, but for me, back I go, so soon as I may get proper passage and a connection which will warrant me the voyage.  Back I go to Canada, to America, to the woods and streams.  I would see again my ancient Du L’hut, and my comrade Pierre Noir, and Tete Gris, the trapper from the Mistasing—­free traders all.  Life is there for the living, my comrades.  This Old World, small and outworn, no more of it for me.”

“And why came you back to this little Old World of ours, an you loved the New World so much?” asked the cynical voice of him who had been called Wilson.

“By the body of God!” cried Du Mesne, “think ye I came of my own free will?  Look here, and find your reason.”  He stripped back the opening of his doublet and under waistcoat, and showed upon his broad shoulder the scar of a red tri-point, deep and livid upon his flesh.  “Look!  There is the fleur-de-lis of France.  That is why I came.  I have rowed in the galleys, me—­me a free man, a man of the woods of New France!”

Murmurs of concern passed among the little group.  Castleton rose from his chair and leaned with his hands upon the table, gazing now at the face and now at the bared shoulder of this stranger, who had by chance become a member of their nightly party.

“I have not been in London a fortnight since my escape,” said the man with the brand.  “I was none the less once a good servant of Louis in New France, for that I found many a new tribe and many a bale of furs that else had never come to the Mountain for the robbery of the lying officers who claim the robe of Louis.  I was a soldier for the king as well as a traveler of the forest.  Was I not with the Le Moynes and the band that crossed the icy North and destroyed your robbing English fur posts on the Bay of Hudson?  I fought there and helped blow down your barriers.  I packed my own robe on my back, and walked for the king, till the raquette thongs cut my ankles to the bone.  For what?  When I came back to the settlements at Quebec I was seized for a coureur de bois, a free trader.  I was herded like a criminal into a French ship, sent over seas to a French prison, branded with a French iron, and set like a brute to pull without reason at a bar of wood in the king’s galleys—­the king’s hell!”

“And yet you are a Frenchman,” sneered Wilson.

“Yet am I not a Frenchman,” cried the other.  “Nor am I an Englishman.  I am no man of a world of galleys and brands.  I am a man of America!”

“’Tis true what he says,” spoke Pembroke. “’Tis said the minister of Louis was feared to keep these men in the galleys, lest their fellows in New France should become too bitter, and should join the savages in their inroads on the starving settlements of Quebec and Montreal.”

“True,” exclaimed Du Mesne.  “The coureurs care naught for the law and little for the king.  As for a ruler, we have discovered that a man makes a most excellent sovereign for himself.”