After a careful examination the sail was made out to be nothing less than an English cruiser, on the watch-out for the enemy's ships, and Captain Alexandre, feeling that after his recent fight he was in no fit condition to meet such a foe, crowded on all sail and stood away N.N.W. with the cruiser in full chase.
All the afternoon the chase continued, and the cruiser was slowly but surely gaining, and had it not been that towards evening the frigate ran into a fog off the Banks of Newfoundland, there is little doubt but that she would soon have been overhauled and compelled to fight, and would in all probability have been captured.
All night the Frenchman kept on, changing his course several times to dodge his pursuer, and next morning, although the fog had lifted, the English cruiser was nowhere to be seen.
Two days afterwards they entered the Gulf; leaving Louisburg and the Ile Royale on their left they stretched across that vast inland sea, and in another four days entered the St. Lawrence River.
The lads were charmed by the wonderful scenery which bordered the river. The bold cliffs and headlands, and the forest-lined banks, the same which Jacques Cartier and his brave little band of voyagers beheld for the first time in 1535, when through every inlet in this great continent they sought a way to the spicy groves of the East Indies, and the far-famed and wondrous, but distant, Cathay, which they fondly imagined lay beyond this new continent, as in truth it really did.
While the frigate was working her way up the St. Lawrence, an incident occurred that was destined to have important consequences on the after-life of our two heroes.
When the ship was anchored for the night off one of the small French settlements below Quebec, a fierce Iroquois chief was brought aboard as a prisoner. A great price had been set upon his scalp by the French Governor, for he was the greatest chief in all the "Five Nations," and his people had been the bitterest enemies of the Canadas, since the days of Champlain.
"What a fine warrior he is!" said Jack. "What a pity he is to be put to death when he reaches Quebec!"
"Fine, indeed!" said one of the soldiers who had brought him aboard. "He has taken more paleface scalps than any man of his race!"
He was a man of powerful stature, with a defiant look, and an eye as proud and piercing as that of the eagle had once been, whose long white feathers now adorned his hair. Erect and brave, with a sullen ferocity of demeanour, he looked scornfully upon his captors, whose petty tyrannies and insults could not drag from him an exclamation of anger or pain, for he seemed possessed of all the stoicism for which his race was famous.