Chouart Groseillers smiles quietly and strokes his black beard. Jean stretches across a bear-skin on the floor and shouts out, "Tell us! Tell us!"
"We had been captives six months. The Iroquois were beginning to let us wander about alone. Chouart there had sewed his thumb up, where an old squaw had hacked at it with a dull shell. The padre's nails, which the Indians tore off in torture, had grown well enough for him to handle a gun. One day we were allowed out to hunt. Chouart brought down three deer, the padre two moose, and I a couple of bear. That night the warriors came back from a raid on Orange with not a thing to eat but one miserable, little, thin, squealing pig. Pardieu! men, 'twas our chance; and the chance is always hiding round a corner for the man who goes ahead."
Radisson paused to whiff his pipe, all the lights in his eyes laughing and his mouth expressionless as steel.
"'Tis an insult among Iroquois to leave food at a feast. There were we with food enough to stuff the tribe torpid as winter toads. The padre was sent round to the lodges with a tom-tom to beat every soul to the feast. Chouart and a Dutch prisoner and I cooked like kings' scullions for four mortal hours!—"
"We wanted to delay the feast till midnight," explains Groseillers.
"And at midnight in trooped every man, woman, and brat of the encampment. The padre takes a tom-tom and stands at one end of the lodge beating a very knave of a rub-a-dub and shouting at the top of his voice: 'Eat, brothers, eat! Bulge the eye, swell the coat, loose the belt! Eat, brothers, eat!' Chouart stands at the boiler ladling out joints faster than an army could gobble. Within an hour every brat lay stretched and the women were snoring asleep where they crouched. From the warriors, here a grunt, there a groan! But Chouart keeps ladling out the meat. Then the Dutchman grabs up a drum at the other end of the lodge, and begins to beat and yell: 'Stuff, brudders, stuff! Vat de gut zperets zend, gast not out! Eat, braves, eat!' And the padre cuts the capers of a fiend on coals. Still the warriors eat! Still the drums beat! Still the meat is heaped! Then, one brave bowls over asleep with his head on his knees! Another warrior tumbles back! Guards sit bolt upright sound asleep as a stone!"
"What did you put in the meat, Pierre?" asked Groseillers absently.
Radisson laughed.
"Do you mind, Chouart," he asked, "how the padre wanted to put poison in the meat, and the Dutchman wouldn't let him? Then the Dutchman wanted to murder them all in their sleep, and the padre wouldn't let him?"
Both men laughed.