chance should come. And now it
seemed to them that it had come. They had destroyed all the tribes who
might have allied themselves with the white men. They had isolated
them. They had supplied themselves with good guns and plenty of
ammunition from the Dutch and English of New York. The long thin line
of French settlements lay naked before them. They were gathered in the
woods, like hounds in leash, waiting for the orders of their chiefs,
which should precipitate them with torch and with tomahawk upon the belt
of villages.

Such was the situation as the little party of refugees paddled along the
bank of the river, seeking the only path which could lead them to peace
and to freedom. Yet it was, as they well knew, a dangerous road to
follow. All down the Richelieu River were the outposts and blockhouses
of the French, for when the feudal system was grafted upon Canada the
various seigneurs or native _noblesse_ were assigned their estates in
the positions which would be of most benefit to the settlement. Each
seigneur with his tenants under him, trained as they were in the use of
arms, formed a military force exactly as they had done in the middle
ages, the farmer holding his fief upon condition that he mustered when
called upon to do so. Hence the old officers of the regiment of
Carignan, and the more hardy of the settlers, had been placed along the
line of the Richelieu, which runs at right angles to the St. Lawrence
towards the Mohawk country. The blockhouses themselves might hold their
own, but to the little party who had to travel down from one to the
other the situation was full of deadly peril. It was true that the
Iroquois were not at war with the English, but they would discriminate
little when on the warpath, and the Americans, even had they wished to
do so, could not separate their fate from that of their two French
companions.

As they ascended the St. Lawrence they met many canoes coming down.
Sometimes it was an officer or an official on his way to the capital
from Three Rivers or Montreal, sometimes it was a load of skins, with
Indians or _coureurs-de-bois_ conveying them down to be shipped to
Europe, and sometimes it was a small canoe which bore a sunburned
grizzly-haired man, with rusty weather-stained black cassock, who
zigzagged from bank to bank, stopping at every Indian hut upon his way.
If aught were amiss with the Church in Canada the fault lay not with men
like these village priests,