slept on.  The Algonquin gave Radisson a push.  The French boy looked up to see the Algonquin studying the postures of the sleeping forms.  The dying fire glimmered like a blotch of blood under the trees.  Stepping stealthy as a cat over the sleeping men, the Indian took possession of their firearms.  Drawn by a kind of horror, Radisson had risen.  The Algonquin thrust one of the tomahawks into the French lad’s hands and pointed without a word at the three sleeping Mohawks.  Then the Indian began the black work.  The Mohawk nearest the fire never knew that he had been struck, and died without a sound.  Radisson tried to imitate the relentless Algonquin, but, unnerved with horror, he bungled the blow and lost hold of the hatchet just as it struck the Mohawk’s head.  The Iroquois sprang up with a shout that awakened the third man, but the Algonquin was ready.  Radisson’s blow proved fatal.  The victim reeled back dead, and the third man was already despatched by the Algonquin.

Radisson was free.  It was a black deed that freed him, but not half so black as the deeds perpetrated in civilized wars for less cause; and for that deed Radisson was to pay swift retribution.

Taking the scalps as trophies to attest his word, the Algonquin threw the bodies into the river.  He seized all the belongings of the dead men but one gun and then launched out with Radisson on the river.  The French youth was conscience-stricken.  “I was sorry to have been in such an encounter,” he writes, “but it was too late to repent.”  Under cover of the night mist and shore foliage, they slipped away with the current.  At first dawn streak, while the mist still hid them, they landed, carried their canoe to a sequestered spot in the dense forest, and lay hidden under the upturned skiff all that day, tormented by swarms of mosquitoes and flies, but not daring to move from concealment.  At nightfall, they again launched down-stream, keeping always in the shadows of the shore till mist and darkness shrouded them, then sheering off for mid-current, where they paddled for dear life.  Where camp-fires glimmered on the banks, they glided past with motionless paddles.  Across Lake Champlain, across the Richelieu, over long portages where every shadow took the shape of an ambushed Iroquois, for fourteen nights they travelled, when at last with many windings and false alarms they swept out on the wide surface of Lake St. Peter in the St. Lawrence.

Within a day’s journey of Three Rivers, they were really in greater danger than they had been in the forests of Lake Champlain.  Iroquois had infested that part of the St. Lawrence for more than a year.  The forest of the south shore, the rush-grown marshes, the wooded islands, all afforded impenetrable hiding.  It was four in the morning when they reached Lake St. Peter.  Concealing their canoe, they withdrew to the woods, cooked their breakfast, covered the fire, and lay down to sleep.  In a