couple of hours the Algonquin impatiently wakened Radisson and urged him to cross the lake to the north shore on the Three Rivers side.  Radisson warned the Indian that the Iroquois were ever lurking about Three Rivers.  The Indian would not wait till sunset.  “Let us go,” he said.  “We are past fear.  Let us shake off the yoke of these whelps that have killed so many French and black robes (priests). . . .  If you come not now that we are so near, I leave you, and will tell the governor you were afraid to come.”

Radisson’s judgment was overruled by the impatient Indian.  They pushed their skiff out from the rushes.  The water lay calm as a sea of silver.  They paddled directly across to get into hiding on the north shore.  Halfway across Radisson, who was at the bow, called out that he saw shadows on the water ahead.  The Indian stood up and declared that the shadow was the reflection of a flying bird.  Barely had they gone a boat length when the shadows multiplied.  They were the reflections of Iroquois ambushed among the rushes.  Heading the canoe back for the south shore, they raced for their lives.  The Iroquois pursued in their own boats.  About a mile from the shore, the strength of the fugitives fagged.  Knowing that the Iroquois were gaining fast, Radisson threw out the loathsome scalps that the Algonquin had persisted in carrying.  By that strange fatality which seems to follow crime, instead of sinking, the hairy scalps floated on the surface of the water back to the pursuing Iroquois.  Shouts of rage broke from the warriors.  Radisson’s skiff was so near the south shore that he could see the pebbled bottom of the lake; but the water was too deep to wade and too clear for a dive, and there was no driftwood to afford hiding.  Then a crash of musketry from the Iroquois knocked the bottom out of the canoe.  The Algonquin fell dead with two bullet wounds in his head and the canoe gradually filled, settled, and sank, with the young Frenchman clinging to the cross-bar mute as stone.  Just as it disappeared under water, Radisson was seized, and the dead Algonquin was thrown into the Mohawk boats.

Radisson alone remained to pay the penalty of a double crime; and he might well have prayed for the boat to sink.  The victors shouted their triumph.  Hurrying ashore, they kindled a great fire.  They tore the heart from the dead Algonquin, transfixed the head on a pike, and cast the mutilated body into the flames for those cannibal rites in which savages thought they gained courage by eating the flesh of their enemies.  Radisson was rifled of clothes and arms, trussed at the elbows, roped round the waist, and driven with blows back to the canoes.  There were other captives among the Mohawks.  As the canoes emerged from the islands, Radisson counted one hundred and fifty Iroquois warriors, with two French captives, one white woman, and seventeen Hurons.  Flaunting from the canoe prows were the scalps of eleven Algonquins.  The victors fired off their muskets and shouted defiance until the valley rang.  As the seventy-five canoes turned up the Richelieu River for the country of the Iroquois, hope died in the captive Hurons and there mingled with the chant of the Mohawks’ war-songs, the low monotonous dirge of the prisoners:—­