against the whites of the Dutch settlements at Orange (Albany), Radisson was taken with them.  Orange, or Albany, consisted at that time of some fifty thatched log-houses surrounded by a settlement of perhaps a hundred and fifty farmers.  This raid was bloodless.  The warriors looted the farmers’ cabins, emptied their cupboards, and drank their beer cellars dry to the last drop.  Once more Radisson kept his head.  While the braves entered Fort Orange roaring drunk, Radisson was alert and sober.  A drunk Indian falls an easy prey in the bartering of pelts.  The Iroquois wanted guns.  The Dutch wanted pelts.  The whites treated the savages like kings; and the Mohawks marched from house to house feasting of the best.  Radisson was dressed in garnished buckskin and had been painted like a Mohawk.  Suspecting some design to escape, his Iroquois friends never left him.  The young Frenchman now saw white men for the first time in almost two years; but the speech that he heard was in a strange tongue.  As Radisson went into the fort, he noticed a soldier among the Dutch.  At the same instant the soldier recognized him as a Frenchman, and oblivious of the Mohawks’ presence blurted out his discovery in Iroquois dialect, vowing that for all the paint and grease, this youth was a white man below.  The fellow’s blundering might have cost Radisson’s life; but the youth had not been a captive among crafty Mohawks for nothing.  Radisson feigned surprise at the accusation.  That quieted the Mohawk suspicions and they were presently deep in the beer pots of the Dutch.  Again the soldier spoke, this time in French.  It was the first time that Radisson had heard his native tongue for months.  He answered in French.  At that the soldier emitted shouts of delight, for he, too, was French, and these strangers in an alien land threw their arms about each other like a pair of long-lost brothers with exclamations of joy too great for words.

[Illustration:  The Battery, New York, in Radisson’s Time.]

From that moment Radisson became the lion of Fort Orange.  The women dragged him to their houses and forced more dainties on him than he could eat.  He was conducted from house to house in triumph, to the amazed delight of the Indians.  The Dutch offered to ransom him at any price; but that would have exposed the Dutch settlement to the resentment of the Mohawks and placed Radisson under heavy obligation to people who were the enemies of New France.  Besides, his honor was pledged to return to his Indian parents; and it was a long way home to have to sail to Europe and back again to Quebec.  Perhaps, too, there was deep in his heart what he did not realize—­a rooted love for the wilds that was to follow him all through life.  By the devious course of captivity, he had tasted of a new freedom and could not give it up.  He declined the offer of the Dutch.  In two days he was back among the Mohawks ten times more a hero than he had ever been.  Mother and sisters were his slaves.