“This is what I must tell you. Claire, there was a man in Montreal who thought the sacking of New France could be prevented if a few determined men would go out and meet these savages on the way, as aggressors, instead of fighting simply on the defensive, as we have done so long. This man found sixteen other young men of his own mind, and they all took a sacred oath to devote themselves to this purpose.”
“Sixteen!” breathed the shuddering girl. “Only sixteen against a thousand Indians?”
“Sixteen are enough if they be fit for the enterprise. One point of rock will break any number of waves. These sixteen men and their leader then obtained the governor’s consent to their enterprise, and they will kneel in the chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu and receive absolution at daybreak this morning.”
“Their leader is Adam Dollard!” Claire’s whispered cry broke out.
“Their leader is Adam Dollard,” he echoed.
She uttered no other sound, but rose up in the boat.
Dollard caught her in his arms, and set her upon his knees. They held each other in an embrace like the rigid lock of death, the smiling, pale night seeming full of crashing and grinding noises, and of chaos like mountains falling.
Length after length the boat shot on, dumb heart-beat after dumb heart-beat, mile after mile. It began to shiver uneasily. Alert to what was before them, and indifferent to their freight of stone in the boat’s end, the Hurons slipped to their knees, each unshipped his oars and took one of the dripping pair for a paddle, fixed his roused eyes on the twisting current, and prepared for the rapids of Lachine. Like an arrow just when the bowstring twangs came the boat at a rock, to be paddled as cleanly aside as if that hissing mass had been a shadow. Right, left, ahead the rapids boiled up; slight shocks ran through the thin-skinned craft as it dodged, shied, leaped, half whirled and half reversed, tumultuously tumbled or shot as if going down a flume. While it lasted the danger seemed endless. But those skilled paddlers played through it with grins of delight folding creases in their leather faces, nor did they settle down dogged and dull Indians again until the boat shot freely out of the rapids upon tame moonlighted ripples once more.
After the Lachine, Dollard lifted his head and said to Claire: