"Well, it seems that we may all lift up our hearts. The English are done for, and next season there is to be a big stamping-out of the Iroquois."
"Who told you that, Jo Lagassé?"
"Everyone is saying it. Pierre Courteau has even some tale that two thousand of them were slaughtered after the battle yonder— Onnontagués and Agniers for the most part. At this rate you idlers will soon be using your bayonets to turn the corn with the rest of us."
"Yes; that's right—call us idlers! And the Iroquois known to be within a dozen miles! You would sing to another tune, my friend, if we idlers offered to march off and leave you just now." The corporal swung round on his thin legs and peered into the belt of trees.
Jo Lagassé grinned.
"No, no, corporal; I was jesting only. To think of me undervaluing the military! Why often and often, as a single man with no ties, I have fancied myself enlisting. But now it will be too late."
"If M. de Montcalm has really swallowed the English," answered the other drily, "it will be too late, as you say."
"But these English, now—I have always had a curiosity to see them. Is it true, corporal, that they have faces like devils, and that he who has the misfortune to be killed by one will assuredly rise the third day? The priests say so."
Corporal Chrétien had never actually confronted his country's foes. "Much would depend," he answered cautiously, "upon circumstances, and upon what you mean by a devil."
While Jo Lagassé scratched his head over this, the wicket opened in the great gate of the Seigniory, and Father Launoy came forth with a troop of children at his heels. The harvesters crowded about him at once.