But his golden dreams were of Quebec, which was a continuous beacon and lure to him.  Despite a life spent chiefly in the woods, which he loved, he always felt the distant spell of great capitals and a gorgeous civilization.  In the New World Quebec came nearer than any other city to fulfilling this idea.  There the nobles of France, then the most glittering country in the world, came in silks and laces and with gold hilted swords by their sides.  The young French officers fought with a jest on their lips, but always with skill and courage, as none knew better than the British colonials themselves.  There was a glow and glamor about Quebec which the sober English capitals farther south did not have.  It might be the glow and glamor of decay, but people did not know it then, although they did know that the Frenchman, with his love of the forest and skill in handling the Indians, was a formidable foe.

“When do you think we’ll reach the St. Lawrence, Dave?” he asked.

“In two or three days if we’re not attacked again,” replied the hunter, “and then we’ll get a bigger boat and row down the river to Quebec.”

“Will they let us pass?”

“Why shouldn’t they?  There’s no war, at least not yet.”

“That battle back there in the gorge may not have been war, but it looked precisely like it.”

The hunter laughed deep in his throat, and it was a satisfied laugh.

“It did look like it,” he said, “and it was war, red war, but nobody was responsible for it.  The Marquis Duquesne, the Governor General of Canada, who is Onontio to our Iroquois, will raise his jeweled hand, and protest that he knew nothing about those Indians, that they were wild warriors from the west, that none of his good, pious Indians of Canada could possibly have been among them.  And the Intendant, Francois Bigot, the most corrupt and ambitious man in North America, will say that they obtained no rifles, no muskets, no powder, no lead from him or his agents.  Oh, no, these fine French gentlemen will disown the attack upon us, as they would have disavowed it, just the same, if we had been killed.  I want to warn you, Robert, and you, Tayoga, that when you reach Quebec you’ll breathe an air that’s not that of the woods, nor yet of Albany or New York.  It’s a bit of old Europe, it’s a reproduction on a small scale of the gorgeous Versailles over there that’s eating the heart out of France.  The Canadian Frenchman is a good man, brave and enduring, as I ought to know, but he’s plundered and fooled by those people who come from France to make fame or quick fortunes here.”

He spoke with earnestness, but not as a hunter.  Rather he seemed now to Robert, despite his forest dress, to be a man of the world, one who understood cities as well as the wilderness.

“I don’t know all your life, Dave,” said young Lennox, “but I’m quite sure you know a great deal more than you would have people to think.  Sometimes I believe you’ve been across the great water.”