sullenly into the bushes
and brought out an armful of muskets.

"Count them, Father," Menard called in French.

The priest did so, and then ran his eye over the party on the beach.

"There are two missing, M'sieu."

Menard turned to the youth, who, though he had not understood the
words, caught their spirit and hurried back for the missing weapons.
Then the Captain walked coolly past them, and took his place in the
canoe. For a long time, as they paddled up the lake, they could see
the Onondagas moving about the beach, and could hear their angry
voices.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE ONLY WAY.

When at last the canoe slipped from the confines of river and hills
and forest out upon the great Lake Ontario, where the green water
stretched flat, east and north and west to the horizon, the Cayuga
warriors said farewell and turned again to their own lands. It was at
noon of a bright day. The water lay close to the white beach, with
hardly a ripple to mar the long black scallops of weed and drift which
the last storm had left on the sand. The sky was fair and the air
sweet.

In the one canoe which the Cayugas had left to them, the little party
headed to the east, now skimming close to the silent beach, now
cutting a straight path across some bay from point to point, out over
the depths where lay the sturgeon and the pickerel and trout and
whitefish. The gulls swooped at them; then, frightened, soared away in
wide, rushing circles, dropping here and there for an overbold minnow.
The afternoon went by with hardly the passing of a word. Each of them,
the Captain, the maid, the priest, looked over the burnished water,
now a fair green or blue sheet, now a space of striped yellow and
green and purple, newly marked by every phase of sun and cloud; and to
each it meant that the journey was done. Here was solitude, with none
of the stir of the forest to bring companionship; but as they looked
out to the cloud-puffs that dipped behind the water at the world's
end, they knew that far yonder were other men whose skins were white,
for all of beard and tan, whose tongue was the tongue of Montreal, of
Quebec, of Paris,--and neither tree nor rock nor mountain lay between.
The water that bore them onward was the water that washed the beach at
Frontenac. Days might pass and find them still on the road; but they
would be glorious days, with the sun overhead and the breeze at their
backs, and at evening the wonder of the western sky to