The red flush in Robert's face deepened and he moved angrily.
"Quiet, boy! Quiet!" whispered the hunter. "He wants a quarrel, and he is surrounded by his friends, while we're strangers in a strange land and a hostile city. Take a trifle of the light white wine that Monsieur Berryer is pouring for you. It won't hurt you."
Robert steadied himself and sipped a little. De Mézy and his satellites, Nemours and Le Moyne, sat down noisily at a table and ordered claret. De Mézy gave the cue. They talked of the Bostonnais, not only of the two Bostonnais who were present, but of the Bostonnais in all the English colonies, applying the word to them whether they came from Massachusetts or New York or Virginia. Robert felt his pulses leaping and the hunter whispered his warning once more.
De Mézy evidently was sincere in his belief that the three understood no French, as he continued to talk freely about the English colonies, the prospect of war, and the superiority of French troops to British or American. Meanwhile he and his two satellites drank freely of the claret and their faces grew more flushed. Robert could stand it no longer.
"Tayoga," he said clearly and in perfect French, "it seems that in
Quebec there are people of loose speech, even as there are in Albany and
New York."
"Our sachems tell us that such is the way of man," said the Onondaga, also in pure French. "Vain boasters dwell too in our own villages. For reasons that I do not know, Manitou has put the foolish as well as the wise into the world."
"To travel, Tayoga, is to find wisdom. We learn what other people know, and we learn to value also the good that we have at home."
"It is so, my friend Lennox. It is only when we go into strange countries and listen to the tongues of the idle and the foolish that we learn the full worth of our own."
"It is not wise, Tayoga, to give a full rein to a loose tongue in a public place."
"Our mothers teach us so, Lennox, as soon as we leave our birch bark cradles."