Brock rose to the occasion.  He proved himself not only a soldier but, best of all, a just man with the highest sense of personal honour.  His distress was all for his brothers.  He would sell his commission, turn over his income as governor and surrender everything, if by doing so he could save the fortunes of his family.  Anything that not only the law but the right might demand.  This failure impaired the former good fellowship between William and Irving Brock.  Isaac wrote Irving, beseeching him to repair the breach.  “Hang the world,” said he; “it is not worth a thought.  Be generous, and find silent comfort in being so.  Oh, my dear brother, forget the past and let us all unite in soothing the grief of one of the best hearts that heaven ever formed, whose wish was to place us all in affluence.  Could tears restore him he would be happy.”

But Isaac was not permitted to know that reconciliation followed his prayers.  While William and Irving were shaking hands, but before they had even heard of the capture of Detroit, Isaac, unknown to them, was at that moment lying cold in death within the cavalier bastion at Fort George.

Little York was now Brock’s headquarters.  He built dockyards to shelter His Majesty’s navy, which consisted of two small vessels!  He planned new Parliament Buildings and an arsenal, prepared township maps showing roads and trails, fords and bridges, all of which latter were in a shocking condition.  At York the timber and brushwood was so dense that travel between the garrison and town was actually by water.  His mind made up that war with the United States was inevitable, he was confronted with crucial questions demanding instant solution.  Chief of these was the defence of the frontier, 1,300 miles in length, which entailed repairs of the boundary forts, the raising of a reliable militia, the increase of the regular troops, the building of more gunboats, and the solving of the Indian problem.

[Illustration:  BUTLER’S BARRACKS (OFFICERS’ QUARTERS), NIAGARA COMMON]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE WAR CLOUD.

A President of the United States had breezily declared that the conquest of Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.”  The final expulsion of England from the American continent he regarded as a matter of course.  Cabinet ministers at Washington and rabid politicians looked upon the forcible annexation of Canada as a foregone conclusion.

One Massachusetts general officer, a professional fire-eater, said he “would capture Canada by contract, raise a company of soldiers and take it in six weeks.”  Henry Clay, another statesman, “verily believed that the militia of Kentucky alone were competent to place Upper Canada at the feet of the Americans.”  Calhoun, also a “war-hawk,” had said that “in four weeks from the time of the declaration of war the whole of Upper and part of Lower Canada would be in possession of the United States.”  All of this was only the spread-eagle bombast of amateur filibusters, as events proved, but good cause for Brock, who had been appointed janitor of Canada and been given the keys of the country, to ponder deeply.