No sooner were the winnings safe—­twenty thousand beaver-skins stowed away in three ships’ holds—­than Pierre Radisson’s foes unmasked.  The morning of our departure Governor Phipps marched all our Frenchmen aboard like captives of war.

“Sir,” expostulated M. de Radisson, “before they gave up the fort I promised these men they should remain in the bay.”

Governor Phipps’s sleepy eyes of a sudden waked wide.

“Aye,” he taunted, “with Frenchmen holding our fort, a pretty trick you could play us when the fancy took you!”

M. Radisson said not a word.  He pulled free a gantlet and strode forward, but the doughty governor hastily scuttled down the ship’s ladder and put a boat’s length of water between him and Pierre Radisson’s challenge.

The gig-boat pulled away.  Our ship had raised anchor.  Radisson leaned over the deck-rail and laughed.

“Egad, Phipps,” he shouted, “a man may not fight cowards, but he can cudgel them!  An I have to wait for you on the River Styx, I’ll punish you for making me break promise to these good fellows!”

“Promise—­and when did promise o’ yours hold good, Pierre Radisson?”

The Frenchman turned with a bitter laugh.

“A giant is big enough to be hit—­a giant is easy to fight,” says he, “but egad, these pigmies crawl all over you and sting to death before they are visible to the naked eye!”

And as the Happy Return wore ship for open sea he stood moodily silent with eyes towards the shore where Governor Phipps’s gig-boat had moored before Fort Nelson.

Then, speaking more to himself than to Jean and me, his lips curled with a hard scorn.

“The Happy Return!” says he.  “Pardieu! ’tis a happy return to beat devils and then have all your own little lies come roosting home like imps that filch the victory!  They don’t trust me because I won by trickery!  Egad! is a slaughter better than a game?  An a man wins, who a devil gives a rush for the winnings?  ’Tis the fight and the game—­pah!—­not the thing won!  Storm and cold, man and beast, powers o’ darkness and devil, knaves and fools and his own sins—­aye, that’s the scratch!—­The man and the beast and the dark and the devil, he can breast ’em all with a bold front!  But knaves and fools and his own sins, pah!—­death grubs!—­hatching and nesting in a man’s bosom till they wake to sting him!  Flesh-worms—­vampires—­blood-suckers—­spun out o’ a man’s own tissue to sap his life!”

He rapped his pistol impatiently against the deck-rail, stalked past us, then turned.

“Lads,” says he, “if you don’t want gall in your wine and a grub in your victory, a’ God’s name keep your own counsel and play the game fair and square and aboveboard.”

And though his speech worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant’s head, Jean and I thought we read some sense in his mixed metaphors.