“O Claire!” trembled Dollard, taking his hat off and standing uncovered before her.
“But you should not have known this until we were old—until you had seen me Madame des Ormeaux many years, dignified and very, very discreet, so that no breath could discredit me save this mine own confession.”
During four days the Iroquois constantly harassed the fort while waiting for their reënforcements, enraged more each day at their own losses and at the handful of French and Indians who stood in the way of their great raid upon New France. Hungry, thirsty, and giddy from loss of sleep, the allies in the fort stood at their loop-holes and poured out destruction. Their supplies were gone, excepting dry hominy, which they could not swallow without water.
Some of the young Frenchmen made a rush to the river, protected by the guns of the fort, and brought all the water they could thus carry. They also dug within the palisade and reached a little clayey moisture which helped to cool their mouths.
Among the Iroquois were renegade Hurons who had been adopted by the Five Nations. During these four days of trial the renegades shouted to their brethren in the fort to come over and surrender to the Iroquois. Seven or eight hundred more warriors were hurrying from the mouth of the Richelieu River, and not a blackened coal was to be left where the fort and the Frenchmen stood.
“Come over,” tempted these Hurons. “The Iroquois will receive you as brothers. Will you stay there and die for the sake of a few Frenchmen?”
First one, then two more, then three at a time, the famished braves of Annahotaha slipped over the intrenchment and deserted, in spite of his rage and exhortations.
On the fifth day, an hour before dawn, a hand of auroral light spread its fingers across the sky from west to east. Betwixt these finger-rays were dark spaces having no stars, but through the pulsing medium of every gigantic finger the constellations glittered. Many signs were seen in the heavens during the colonial years of New France, but nothing like the blessed hand stretched over the Long Saut.