k to conduct the two white men down to Quebec. They
embarked at once, scouts to the fore reconnoitering all portages, and
guards on duty wherever the {107} boats landed. A few Iroquois braves
were seen near the Long Sault Rapids, but they took to their heels in
such evident fright that Radisson was puzzled to know what had become
of the one thousand braves on the warpath. Carrying the beaver pelts
along the portage so they could be used as shields in case of attack,
the Algonquins came to the foot of the Long Sault Rapids near Montreal,
and saw plainly what had happened to the invading warriors. A
barricade of logs the shape of a square fort stood on the shore. From
the pickets hung the scalps of dead Indians and on the sands lay the
charred remains of white men. Every tree for yards round was peppered
with bullet holes. Here was a charred stake where some victim had been
tortured; there the smashed remnants of half-burnt canoes; and at
another point empty powder barrels. A terrible battle had been waged
but a week before. Radisson could trace, inside the barricade of logs,
holes scooped in the sand where the besieged, desperate with thirst,
had drunk the muddy water. At intervals in the palisades openings had
been hacked, and these were blood stained, as if the scene of the
fiercest fighting. Bark had been burnt from the logs in places, where
the assailants had set fire to the fort.

From Indian refugees at Montreal, Radisson learned details of the
fight. It was the battle most famous in early Canadian annals--the
Long Sault. All winter Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal had cowered
in terror of the coming Iroquois. In imagination the beleaguered
garrisons foresaw themselves martyrs of Mohawk ferocity. It was
learned that seven hundred of the Iroquois warriors were hovering round
the Richelieu opposite Three Rivers. The rest of the braves had passed
the winter man-hunting in the Huron country, and were in spring
descending the Ottawa to unite with the lower band.

Week after week Quebec awaited the blow; but the blow never fell, for
at Montreal was a little band of seventeen heroes, led by a youth of
twenty-five,--Adam Dollard,--who longed to wipe out the stain of a
misspent boyhood by some glorious exploit in the service of the Holy
Cross.

{108} When word came that the upper foragers were descending from the
country of the Hurons to unite with the lower Iroquois against
Montreal, Dollard proposed t