s alike when the hunt failed and the famine came. La
Chesnaye, the merchant prince, it was, who managed this low
trafficking. Indeed, for the rubbing together of more doubloons in his
money-bags I think that La Chesnaye's servile nature would have
bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank. But,
as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the
knavery, the gin was nine parts rain-water.

"The more cheat, you, to lay such unction to your conscience," says M.
de Radisson. "Be an honest knave, La Chesnaye!"

Foret, the marquis, stalked up and down before the gate with two guards
at his heels. All day long birch canoes and log dugouts and tubby
pirogues and crazy rafts of loose-lashed pine logs drifted to our
water-front with bands of squalid Indians bringing their pelts. Skin
tepees rose outside our palisades like an army of mushrooms. Naked
brats with wisps of hair coarse as a horse's mane crawled over our
mounted cannon, or scudded between our feet like pups, or felt our
European clothes with impudent wonder. Young girls having hair
plastered flat with bear's grease stood peeping shyly from tent flaps.
Old squaws with skin withered to a parchment hung over the campfires,
cooking. And at the loopholes pressed the braves and the bucks and the
chief men exchanging beaver-skins for old iron, or a silver fox for a
drink of gin, or ermine enough to make His Majesty's coronation robe
for some flashy trinket to trick out a vain squaw. From dawn to dusk
ran the patter of moccasined feet, man after man toiling up from
river-front to fort gate with bundles of peltries on his back and a
carrying strap across his brow.

Unarmed, among the savages, pacifying drunken hostiles at the
water-front, bidding Jean and me look after the carriers, in the
gateway, helping Sieur de Groseillers to sort the furs--Pierre Radisson
was everywhere. In the guard-house were more English prisoners than we
had crews of French; and in the mess-room sat Governor Brigdar of the
Hudson's Bay Company, who took his captivity mighty ill and grew
prodigious pot-valiant over his cups. Here, too, lolled Ben Gillam,
the young New Englander, rumbling out a drunken vengeance against those
inland pirates, who had deprived him of the season's furs.

Once, I mind, when M. Radisson came suddenly on these two worthies,
their fuddled heads were close together above the table.

"Look you," Ben was saying in a big, raspi