As his Huron rowed back along Lake St. Louis they saw a canoe drifting, and cautiously approaching it they found that it held a wounded brave in the war-dress of the Hurons. He lay panting in his little craft, feverish and helpless, and they towed him to the island and carried him up into the seigniory kitchen.
The May sun shone and bees buzzed past the windows; all the landscape and the pleasant world seemed to contradict the existence of such a blot on nature as a blood-streaked man.
The family gathered fearfully about La Mouche as he lay upon a bear-skin brought down from the saloon for him by Joan.
Jacques gave him brandy and Louise bathed his wounds. They used such surgery as they knew, and La Mouche told them all the story of the Long Saut except his desertion. None of five deserters who escaped from the Iroquois, and from the tortures to which the Iroquois put all the deserters after burning the fort, could tell the truth about their own action until long after.
Jacques turned away from this renegade and threw both arms around one of the cemented pillars. Louise fell on her knees beside him, and the broad hall was filled with wailings. There were consolations which Louise remembered when her religion and her stolid sense of duty began reconciling her to the eternal absence of Claire and Dollard. She stood up and took her apron to wipe her good man’s eyes, saying without greediness and merely as seizing on a tangible fact:
“Thou hast the island of St. Bernard left thee.”
“But he that is gone,” sobbed Jacques, “he was to me more than the whole earth.”
The four other Hurons who escaped carried all the details of the battle, except their own desertion, to Montreal. But the Iroquois were not so reticent, and in time this remnant of Hurons was brought to admit that Annahotaha alone of the tribe stood by the Frenchmen to the last.
As for the Iroquois, they slunk back to their own country utterly defeated and confounded. They had no further desire to fight such an enemy. Says the historian,[12] “If seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such fighting behind walls of stone?” The colony of New France was redeemed out of their hands. After the struggle at the Long Saut it enjoyed such a period of rest and peace as the Iroquois had not permitted it for years.
When La Mouche recovered from his wounds he crept away to his côte down the river, and with little regret the people on St. Bernard heard of him no more.