The youths listened with pent-up feelings, while the hunter told all he had heard from passing voyageurs and Indian runners of the disasters that had befallen the English arms of late. He described the disaster of Ticonderoga, the fall of Fort Oswego, and the partial success of Dieskau, but when he spoke of the capture of Fort William Henry and the frightful massacre which followed, the lads sprang to their feet, and declared in one breath--
"We will go and offer our services to General Wolfe, for our country needs us!"
The light of battle was in their eyes, the courage of manhood mounted to their brows, as they clasped each other's hand across the fire, and repeated their promise to join the English lines; then, turning to the trapper, who remained seated by the fire, smoking calmly and puffing the blue smoke from an Indian calumet, Jamie said--
"Say, hunter! Will you join us on yet another trail, where the game shall be, not redskins, but the recreants of Montcalm, and the reward, not Indian scalps, but the honour of the old flag, or--a soldier's grave?"
"Lads," he replied, "my country has not been over kind to me. I am an exile from my native land, and yet I have never committed a crime. My conscience is clear; but I, too, feel my country's call, and I know her need, and it shall never be said of me that I shirked the call of duty, when already so many exiles have left their bones to bleach in the forest, for the land that has denied to them a hearth and a home. I will go! Let us bid good-bye to the chief and his braves."
The parting scenes between the White Eagle and the hunter, the paleface youths and their Indian friends, was affecting in the extreme, when it became known that they were now about to part, and perhaps for ever. All the rich memories of their forest life were brought back to them, and to the palefaces especially the fidelity of their red brothers, their lofty characters, despite their many failings, their simple faith in the Great Spirit, the Wacondah of their race; their comradeship in hunting the red deer and the shaggy brown bear amid all the savage scenery of mountain and forest, and taking from the streams and lakes the salmon and the sturgeon, or descending wild rapids and torrents in their frail birch-bark canoes, with these children of the Manitou--all this they recalled, and forsook it with a pang of regret; but another voice was calling to them, and their beating hearts were but responding to the call of Duty.
At last, they stood by their canoe ready to depart, at the lower end of the portage, below the Falls; and the Indians were standing around them, sad and melancholy, for their grief had for once broken down their manly reserve, and the stoic mask, which had enabled some amongst them to endure torture without flinching, could not now keep back the moisture from many an eye.
Listen! the great chief, in prophetic strain, is speaking his last solemn words of farewell--
"The face of the Manitou is hid behind a cloud, and the hearts of his red children are sad. Nevermore will the Great Paleface Hunter, the friend of the White Eagle, hunt the deer in the hills of the Iroquois. Nevermore will he sit at the council fire of my people, and smoke the calumet, while his red brothers listen to the wisdom that falls from his lips like the dew from heaven. Nevermore will he speak to us of the sacred writings that the Wacondah has given to the children of the Sun-rising!
"When his canoe has sailed into the regions of the East-wind, then shall my people be scattered like the leaves in autumn, and the few that remain, to fish the streams and hunt the moose and the elk, will be but as blasted pines, where the fires of the forest have raged."