"A bad blow—and yet he escaped."
"A bad blow. Either from that or from the drenching, towards morning his head wandered and he talked at full speed for an hour."
"Of what did he talk?" asked the priest quickly.
"That I cannot tell, since he chattered in English."
"English? How do you know that it was English?"
"Why, since it was not French, nor like any kind of Indian! Moreover, I have heard the English talk. They were prisoners brought down from Oswego, twelve bateaux in all, and I took them through the falls. When they talked, it was just as this man chattered last night."
"Then you, too, Dominique, find your guest a strange fellow?"
"Oh, as for that! He is a sergeant, and of the regiment of Béarn. Your reverence saw his coat hanging by the bed."
"Even in that there is something strange. For Béarn lies in the Midi, close to the Pyrenees; and, as I understand, the regiment of Béarn was recruited and officered almost entirely from its own province. But this Sergeant à Clive comes from the north; his speech has no taste of the south in it, and indeed he owns to me that he is a northerner. He says further that he comes from my own seminary of Douai. And this again is correct; for I cross-questioned him on the seminary, and he knows it as a hand knows its glove—the customs of the place, the lectures, the books in use there. He has told me, moreover, why he left it.… Dominique, you do right in misliking your guest."
"I do not say, Father, that I mislike him. I fear him a little—I cannot tell why."