f a sudden waked wide.

"Aye," he taunted, "with Frenchmen holding our fort, a pretty trick you
could play us when the fancy took you!"

M. Radisson said not a word. He pulled free a gantlet and strode
forward, but the doughty governor hastily scuttled down the ship's
ladder and put a boat's length of water between him and Pierre
Radisson's challenge.

The gig-boat pulled away. Our ship had raised anchor. Radisson leaned
over the deck-rail and laughed.

"Egad, Phipps," he shouted, "a man may not fight cowards, but he can
cudgel them! An I have to wait for you on the River Styx, I'll punish
you for making me break promise to these good fellows!"

"Promise--and when did promise o' yours hold good, Pierre Radisson?"

The Frenchman turned with a bitter laugh.

"A giant is big enough to be hit--a giant is easy to fight," says he,
"but egad, these pigmies crawl all over you and sting to death before
they are visible to the naked eye!"

And as the Happy Return wore ship for open sea he stood moodily silent
with eyes towards the shore where Governor Phipps's gig-boat had moored
before Fort Nelson.

Then, speaking more to himself than to Jean and me, his lips curled
with a hard scorn.

"The Happy Return!" says he. "Pardieu! 'tis a happy return to beat
devils and then have all your own little lies come roosting home like
imps that filch the victory! They don't trust me because I won by
trickery! Egad! is a slaughter better than a game? An a man wins, who
a devil gives a rush for the winnings? 'Tis the fight and the
game--pah!--not the thing won! Storm and cold, man and beast, powers
o' darkness and devil, knaves and fools and his own sins--aye, that's
the scratch!--The man and the beast and the dark and the devil, he can
breast 'em all with a bold front! But knaves and fools and his own
sins, pah!--death grubs!--hatching and nesting in a man's bosom till
they wake to sting him! Flesh-worms--vampires--blood-suckers--spun out
o' a man's own tissue to sap his life!"

He rapped his pistol impatiently against the deck-rail, stalked past
us, then turned.

"Lads," says he, "if you don't want gall in your wine and a grub in
your victory, a' God's name keep your own counsel and play the game
fair and square and aboveboard."

And though his speech worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun
rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we
read some sense in his mixed metaphors.

On all tha