“Mother of God!” cried Jean Breboeuf, bending low and pulling his tunic tighter by the belt, as he came gasping into the faint circle of light which still remained at the fire log. “’Tis murderous, this storm!  Ah, Monsieur du Mesne, we are dead men!  But what matter?  ’Tis as well now as later.  Said I not so to you all the way down Michiganon from the Straits?  A rabbit crossed my path at the last camp before Michilimackinac, and when we took boat to leave the mission at the Straits, three crows flew directly across our way.  Did I not beseech you to turn back?  Did I not tell you, most of all, that we had no right, honest voyageurs that we are, to leave for the woods without confessing to the good father?  ’Tis two years now since I have been proper shriven, and two years is too long for a voyageur to remain unabsolved.  Mother of God!  When I see the lightnings and listen to that wind, I bethink me of my sins—­my sins!  I vow a bale of beaver—­”

“Pish!  Jean,” responded Du Mesne, who had come in from the cover of the wood and was casting about in the darkness as best he might to see that all was made secure.  “Thou’lt feel better when the sun shines again.  Call Pierre Noir, and hurry, or our canoe will pound to bits upon the beach.  Come!”

All three went now knee-deep in the surf, and Du Mesne, clinging to the gunwale as he passed out, was soon waist deep, and time and again lost his footing in the flood.

“Pull!” he cried at last.  “Now, en avant!” He had flung himself over the stern, and with his knife cut the hide rope of the anchor-stone.  Overboard again in an instant, he joined the others in their rush up the beach, and the three bore their ship upon their shoulders above the reach of the waves.

“Myself,” said Pierre Noir, “shall sleep beneath the boat to-night, for since she sheds water from below, she may do as well from above.”

“Even so, Pierre Noir,” said Du Mesne, “but get you the boat farther toward your own camp to-night.  Do you not see that Monsieur L’as is not with us?”

“Eh bien?”

“And were he not surely with us at such time, unless—?”

“Oh, assurement!” replied Pierre Noir.  “Jean Breboeuf, aid me in taking the boat back to our camp in the woods.”

Now came the rain.  Not in steady and even downpour, not with intermittent showers, but in a sidelong, terrifying torrent, drenching, biting, cutting in its violence.  The swift weight of the rain gave to the trees more burden than they could bear.  As before the storm, when all was still, there had come time and again the warning boom of a falling tree, stricken with mysterious mortal dread of that which was to come, so now, in the riot of that arrived danger, first one and then another wide-armed monarch of the wood crashed down, adding with its downfall to the testimony of the assailing tempest’s strength and fury.  The lightning now came not only in ragged blazes and long ripping lines of light, but in bursts and shocks, and in bomb-like balls, exploding with elemental detonations.  Balls of this tense surcharged essence rolled out over the comb of the bluff, fell upon the shadows of the water, and seemed to bound from crest to white-capped crest, till at last they split and burst asunder like some ominous missiles from engines of wrath and destruction.