The red flush in Robert’s face deepened and he moved angrily.

“Quiet, boy!  Quiet!” whispered the hunter.  “He wants a quarrel, and he is surrounded by his friends, while we’re strangers in a strange land and a hostile city.  Take a trifle of the light white wine that Monsieur Berryer is pouring for you.  It won’t hurt you.”

Robert steadied himself and sipped a little.  De Mezy and his satellites, Nemours and Le Moyne, sat down noisily at a table and ordered claret.  De Mezy gave the cue.  They talked of the Bostonnais, not only of the two Bostonnais who were present, but of the Bostonnais in all the English colonies, applying the word to them whether they came from Massachusetts or New York or Virginia.  Robert felt his pulses leaping and the hunter whispered his warning once more.

De Mezy evidently was sincere in his belief that the three understood no French, as he continued to talk freely about the English colonies, the prospect of war, and the superiority of French troops to British or American.  Meanwhile he and his two satellites drank freely of the claret and their faces grew more flushed.  Robert could stand it no longer.

“Tayoga,” he said clearly and in perfect French, “it seems that in Quebec there are people of loose speech, even as there are in Albany and New York.”

“Our sachems tell us that such is the way of man,” said the Onondaga, also in pure French.  “Vain boasters dwell too in our own villages.  For reasons that I do not know, Manitou has put the foolish as well as the wise into the world.”

“To travel, Tayoga, is to find wisdom.  We learn what other people know, and we learn to value also the good that we have at home.”

“It is so, my friend Lennox.  It is only when we go into strange countries and listen to the tongues of the idle and the foolish that we learn the full worth of our own.”

“It is not wise, Tayoga, to give a full rein to a loose tongue in a public place.”

“Our mothers teach us so, Lennox, as soon as we leave our birch bark cradles.”

Willet had raised his hand in warning, but he saw that it was too late.  The young blood in the veins of both Tayoga and Robert was hot, and the Iroquois was stirred not less deeply than the white man.

“The sachems tell us,” he said, “that sometimes a man speaks foolish words because he is born foolish, again he says them at times because his temper or drink makes him foolish, or he may say them because it is his wish to be foolish and he has cultivated foolish ways all his life.  This last class is the worst of all, Lennox, my friend, but there is a certain number of them in all lands, as one finds when one travels.”

The Onondaga spoke with great clearness and precision in his measured school French and a moment of dead silence followed.  Then Robert said: 

“It is true, Tayoga.  The chiefs of the Hodenosaunee are great and wise men.  They have lived and seen much, and seeing they have remembered.  They know that speech was given to man in order that he might convey his thoughts to another, and not that he might make a fool of himself.”