When the English emerged from the woods and saw the extent of the disaster, they knew they were too late. Not a house, not a building of any kind, but was already wrapped in a roaring torrent of flame, and against the broad illumination could be seen the figures of the savages, fantastically dancing. The English captain formed his line with prudent deliberation, and then led the attack at a run.
Never dreaming of so rude an interruption, the raiders were taken utterly by surprise and made no effective resistance. A number fell at the first volley, which the English poured in upon them in charging. Then followed a hand-to-hand fight, fierce but brief, which Le Loutre didn't see, as he had wisely retired on the instant of the Englishmen's arrival. He was followed by two of the Acadians, and two or three of the more prudent of the Micmacs; but the rest of his party, fired with blind fury by the liquor which they had found among the village stores, remained to fight with a drunken recklessness and fell to a man beneath the steel of the avengers.
Left masters of the field, the rescue party gazed with horror on the ruin they had come too late to avert. With a grim, poetic justice they cast the bodies of their slain foes into the fires which had already consumed the victims of their ferocity. While this was going on the leader of the party, a young lieutenant, stood apart in deepest dejection.
"What's the matter with the general?" inquired a soldier, pointing with his thumb in the direction of his sorrowing chief.
"I'm afeard as how that little niece of his'n, as you've seed him a-danderin' many a time in Halifax, was visitin' folks here. If so be what I've hearn be true, them yellin' butchers has done for her, sure pop. I tell ye, Bill, she was a little beauty, an' darter of the cap'n they murdered last September down to Fort Lawrence."
"I ricklecs the child well" replied Bill, shaking his head slowly. "It was a purty one, an' no mistake! An' Cap'n Howe's darter, too. I swan!"
In a little while the careless-hearted soldiers were asleep amid the ashes of Kenneticook village, while the young lieutenant lay awake, his heart aching for his golden-haired pet, his widowed sister's child. The next day he gave his men a long rest, for they had done some severe forced marching. When at length he reached Piziquid he little dreamed that the child whose death he mourned was at that very moment sailing down the river bound for Beauséjour and a long sojourn among her people's enemies.
In the house of Antoine Lecorbeau things went on more pleasantly than with most of his fellow-Acadians. With the good will of Vergor, the commandant of Beauséjour, who made enormous profits out of the Acadian's tireless diligence, Lecorbeau became once more fairly prosperous; and Le Loutre had grown again friendly. But most of the Acadians found themselves in a truly pitiable plight. There were not lands enough to supply them all, and they pined for the farms of Acadie which Le Loutre had forced them to forsake. Threatened with excommunication and the scalping knife if they should return to their allegiance, and with starvation if they obeyed the commands of their heartless superiors at Quebec, they were girt about on all sides with pain and peril. Vacillating, unable to think boldly for themselves, they were doubtless much to blame, but their miseries were infinitely more than they deserved. The punishments that fell upon them fell upon the wrong shoulders. The English, who treated them for a long time with the most patient forbearance, were compelled at length, in self-defense, to adopt an attitude of rigorous severity; and by the French, in whose cause they suffered everything, they were regarded as mere tools, to be used till destroyed. At the door of the corrupt officials of France may be laid all their miseries.
After the affair at Kenneticook Le Loutre found that Cobequid was no longer the place for him. He needed the shelter of Beauséjour. There, by force of his fanatic zeal, his ability, and his power over the Acadians, he divided the authority of the fort with its corrupt commandant. He never dreamed of the part Pierre had played that dreadful night on the Kenneticook. He knew Lecorbeau had somewhere picked up an English child. But a child was in his eyes quite too trivial a matter to call for any comment.
As time went on Pierre's little one, as she was generally called--"la p'tite de Pierre"--picked up the French of her new Acadian home, and went far to forgetting her English. In the eyes of Lecorbeau and his wife she came to seem like one of their own and she was a favorite with the whole family; but to Pierre she clung as if he were her father and mother in one. As soon as she had learned a little French she was questioned minutely as to her parents and her home. Her name, Edie Howe, had at once been associated with that of the lamented captain.