“You are the fellow I saw whining yesterday at Sieur de la Salle’s heels. What hath the Sieur de la Salle done to any of you worthless woods-rangers, except give you labor and wages, when the bread you eat is a waste of his substance?”
Jolycœur, not daring to reply to a priest, slunk away in the crowd.
[Book II.]
FORT FRONTENAC.
1683 A. D.
[I.]
RIVAL MASTERS.
The gate of Fort Frontenac opened to admit several persons headed by a man who had a closely wrapped girl by his side. Before wooden palisades and walls of stone enclosed her, she turned her face to look across the mouth of Cataraqui River and at Lake Ontario rippling full of submerged moonlight. A magnified moon was rising. Farther than eye could reach it softened that northern landscape and provoked mystery in the shadows of the Thousand Islands.