Returning to the palisade he shouted up that the coast was clear, and fell to work searching the faces of the fallen. The fresh snow, in which they lay deep, had already frozen about them; and his eye, as he swung the lantern slowly round, fell on a hand and arm which stood up stiffly above the white surface.
He stepped forward, flashing his lantern on the dead man's face—and dropped on his knees beside it.
"Do you know him, sir?" McQuarters' voice was speaking, close by.
"I know him," answered John dully, and groped and found a thin blade which lay beside the corpse. "He was my cousin, and once my best friend."
He felt the edge of the sword with his gloved hand, all the while staring at the arm pointing upwards and fixed in the rigor of death, frozen in its last gesture as Richard Montgomery had lifted it to wave forward his men. And as if the last thirty or forty minutes had never been, he found himself saying to McQuarters:
"We have come around by strange roads, sergeant, and some of us have parted with much on the way."
He looked up; but his gaze, travelling past McQuarters who stooped over the corpse, fell on the figure of a woman who had approached and halted at three paces' distance; a hooded figure in the dress of the Hospitalieres.
Something in her attitude told him that she had heard. He arose, holding the lantern high; and stared, shaking, into a face which no uncomely linen swathings could disguise from him—into eyes which death only would teach him to forget.
The fatigue-party lifted the corpse. So Richard Montgomery entered Quebec as he had promised—a General of Brigade.
The drums had ceased to call the alarm from the Citadel; musketry no longer crackled in the riverside quarter of Sault-au-Matelot. The assault had been beaten off, and close on four hundred prisoners were being marched up the hill followed by crowds of excited Quebecers. But John à Cleeve roamed the streets at random, alone, unconscious that all the while he gripped the hilt of his cousin's naked sword.