hese
houses last night, for I searched them myself."

"I hid here before daybreak," she answered briefly.

"But if you knew the English were coming, why did you not give the
alarm?"

"I was their prisoner."

"And where will you go now?"

She looked towards the Plains of Abraham and said nothing. The open
chink showed Wolfe's six battalions of scarlet lines moving forward or
pausing, and the ridge above them thronging with white uniforms.

"If you will trust yourself to me, mamoiselle," proposed Jacques, who
considered that it was not the part of a soldier or a gentleman to
leave any woman alone in this hut to take the chances of battle, and
particularly a woman who had bound up his head, "I will do my best to
help you inside the French lines."

The singular woman did not reply to him, but continued looking through
the chink. Skirmishers were out. Puffs of smoke from cornfields and
knolls showed where Canadians and Indians hid, creeping to the flank
of the enemy.

Jacques stooped down himself, and struck his hands together at these
sights.

"Monsieur de Montcalm is awake, mademoiselle! And see our
sharpshooters picking them off! We can easily run inside the French
lines now. These English will soon be tumbled back the way they came
up."

In another hour the group of houses was a roaring furnace. A
detachment of English light infantry, wheeled to drive out the
bushfighters, had lost and retaken it many times, and neither party
gave up the ready fortress until it was set on fire. Crumbling red
logs hissed in the thin rain, and smoke spread from them across the
sodden ground where Wolfe moved. The sick man had become an invincible
spirit. He flew along the ranks, waving his sword, the sleeve falling
away from his thin arm. The great soldier had thrown himself on this
venture without a chance of retreat, but every risk had been thought
of and met. He had a battalion guarding the landing. He had a force
far in the rear to watch the motions of the French at Cap Rouge. By
the arrangement of his front he had taken precautions against being
outflanked. And he knew his army was with him to a man. But Montcalm
rode up to meet him hampered by insubordinate confusion.

Jeannette Descheneaux, carried along, with the boy, by Canadians and
Indians from the English rear to the Cote Ste. Genevieve, lay dazed in
the withered grass during the greater part of the action which decided
her people's hold on the New World. The gr