“Fifty for women, my love! Do you hear that, Mrs. Lambert?” cries the Colonel, lifting up his wife's hair.
“The murderous villains!” says Harry, again. “Hunt 'em down, sir! Hunt 'em down!”
“I know not how long I lay in my fever,” George resumed. “When I awoke to my senses, my dear Florac was gone. He and his company had been despatched on an enterprise against an English fort on the Pennsylvanian territory, which the French claimed, too. In Duquesne, when I came to be able to ask and understand what was said to me, there were not above thirty Europeans left. The place might have been taken over and over again, had any of our people had the courage to return after their disaster.
“My old enemy the ague-fever set in again upon me as I lay here by the river-side. 'Tis a wonder how I ever survived. But for the goodness of a half-breed woman in the fort, who took pity on me, and tended me, I never should have recovered, and my poor Harry would be what he fancied himself yesterday, our grandfather's heir, our mother's only son.
“I remembered how, when Florac laid me in his bed, he put under my pillow my money, my watch, and a trinket or two which I had. When I woke to myself these were all gone; and a surly old sergeant, the only officer left in the quarter, told me, with a curse, that I was lucky enough to be left with my life at all; that it was only my white cockade and coat had saved me from the fate which the other canaille of Rosbifs had deservedly met with.
“At the time of my recovery the fort was almost emptied of the garrison. The Indians had retired enriched with British plunder, and the chief part of the French regulars were gone upon expeditions northward. My good Florac had left me upon his service, consigning me to the care of an invalided sergeant. Monsieur de Contrecoeur had accompanied one of these expeditions, leaving an old lieutenant, Museau by name, in command at Duquesne.
“This man had long been out of France, and serving in the colonies. His character, doubtless, had been indifferent at home; and he knew that, according to the system pursued in France, where almost all promotion is given to the noblesse, he never would advance in rank. And he had made free with my guineas, I suppose, as he had with my watch, for I saw it one day on his chest when I was sitting with him in his quarter.
“Monsieur Museau and I managed to be pretty good friends. If I could be exchanged, or sent home, I told him that my mother would pay liberally for my ransom; and I suppose this idea excited the cupidity of the commandant, for a trapper coming in the winter, whilst I still lay very ill with fever, Museau consented that I should write home to my mother, but that the letter should be in French, that he should see it, and that I should say I was in the hands of the Indians, and should not be ransomed under ten thousand livres.
“In vain I said I was a prisoner to the troops of his Most Christian Majesty, that I expected the treatment of a gentleman and an officer. Museau swore that letter should go, and no other; that if I hesitated, he would fling me out of the fort, or hand me over to the tender mercies of his ruffian Indian allies. He would not let the trapper communicate with me except in his presence. Life and liberty are sweet. I resisted for a while, but I was pulled down with weakness, and shuddering with fever; I wrote such a letter as the rascal consented to let pass, and the trapper went away with my missive, which he promised, in three weeks, to deliver to my mother in Virginia.
“Three weeks, six, twelve, passed. The messenger never returned. The winter came and went, and all our little plantations round the fort, where the French soldiers had cleared corn-ground and planted gardens and peach- and apple-trees down to the Monongahela, were in full blossom. Heaven knows how I crept through the weary time! When I was pretty well, I made drawings of the soldiers of the garrison, and of the half-breed and her child (Museau's child), and of Museau himself, whom, I am ashamed to say, I flattered outrageously; and there was an old guitar left in the fort, and I sang to it, and played on it some French airs which I knew, and ingratiated myself as best I could with my gaolers; and so the weary months passed, but the messenger never returned.