“Poor boy!” he said, over and over. “Poor boy!”
He looked toward the door, but the maid had gone inside.
CHAPTER X.
A NIGHT COUNCIL.
The night crept by, as had the day, wearily.
The two men sat in the doorway or walked slowly back and forth across the front of the hut, saying little. The Captain was calling to mind every incident of their capture, and of the original trouble between La Grange and the hunting party. He went over the conversation with Major Provost at Quebec word by word, until he felt sure in his authority as the Governor’s representative; although the written orders in the leather bag that hung from his neck were concerned only with his duties in preparing Fort Frontenac for the advancing column,––duties that he had not fulfilled.
A plan was forming in his mind which would make strong demands on the good faith of Major Provost and the Governor. He knew, as every old soldier knows, that governments and rulers are thankless, that even written authority 192 is none too binding, if to make it good should inconvenience those who so easily give it. He knew further that if he should succeed now in staying the Onondagas and Cayugas by pledges which, perchance, it might not please Governor Denonville to observe, the last frail ties that held the Iroquois to the French would be broken, and England would reign from the Hudson to the river of the Illinois. And he sighed, as he had sighed many times before, for the old days under Frontenac, under the only Governor of New France who could hold these slippery redskins to their obligations.
“Father,” he said finally, “I begin to see a way.”