My first act was to send a runner, on snow-shoes, to Canard, with a scrawled note to Mizpah. Explaining nothing, I merely begged that she and Prudence, with Marc and Father Fafard, should meet me at the Forge about noon of the following day. In the case of Marc not being yet strong enough to journey so far, I prayed Mizpah herself, in any event, to come without fail. My next was to send a messenger for Xavier and Philip. My heart had fallen to aching curiously for the child,—insomuch that I marvelled at it, till at length I set it down as a mere whimsical counterfeit of my longing for his mother.
Being now refreshed and altogether myself again, I went to visit the lane wherein the fight had opened. The very first house, whose shattered door and windows, blood-smeared threshold, and dripping window-sills, showed that the fight had there raged long and madly, had one great apple tree beside its garden gate. A chill of foreboding smote me as I marked it. I approached with a curious and painful expectancy, the words of the Black Abbé ringing again in my ears. At the foot of the apple tree the snow was drifted deep. It half covered a pitifully huddled body.
I lifted the body. It was Tamin.
He had been shot through the lungs, and his blood, melting the snow, had gathered in a crimson pool beneath him. Here was one grim prophecy fulfilled. Carrying him into the house, I laid him gently on a bed. Then I turned away with a very sorrowful heart; for there was much to do, and the dead are not urgent.
Even as I turned, my heart jumped with a new and sickening dread. Xavier stood before me—Xavier, with wild eyes, and face darkly clotted with blood. The next instant he threw himself at my feet.
"The child!" he muttered, covering his face. "They have carried him away. They have carried Philip away!"
"What do you mean?" I cried, in a voice which my fear made harsh, while at the same time I dragged him to his feet. "Who have carried him away? Who?"
But I knew the answer ere he could speak it,—I knew my enemy had seized the chances of the battle and the night.
"The Black Abbé," wailed the lad, in a voice of poignant sorrow. "He came in the night, with two Chepody Acadians dressed up like Indians, and seized me asleep, and bound me."
"But Philip!" I cried. "Where have they taken him?" And even as I spoke I was planning swiftly.