g and reechoing from corner to corner. One would have imagined
the fort was crowded with soldiers, and the Iroquois afterwards
confessed they had been completely deceived; that the vigilance of the
guard kept them from attempting to scale the walls. About midnight the
sentinel at the gate bastion called out, "Mademoiselle! I hear
something!"

I saw it was our cattle.

"Let me open the gates," urged the sentry.

"God forbid," said I; "the savages are likely behind, driving the
animals in."

Nevertheless I _did_ open the gates and let the cattle in, my brothers
standing on each side, ready to shoot if an Indian appeared.

At last came daylight; and we were hopeful for aid from Montreal; but
Marguerite Fontaine, being timorous as all Parisian women are, begged
her husband to try and escape. The poor husband was almost distracted
as she insisted, and he told her he would set her out in the canoe with
her two sons, who could paddle it, but he would not abandon
Mademoiselle in Vercheres. I had been twenty-four hours without rest
or food, and had not {171} once gone from the bastion. On the eighth
day of the siege Lieutenant de La Monnerie reached the fort during the
night with forty men.

One of our sentries had called out, "Who goes?"

I was dozing with my head on a table and a musket across my arm. The
sentry said there were voices on the water. I called, "Who are you?"

They answered, "French--come to your aid!"

I went down to the bank, saying: "Sir, but you are welcome! I
surrender my arms to you!"

"Mademoiselle," he answered, "they are in good hands."

I forgot one incident. On the day of the attack I remembered about one
in the afternoon that our linen was outside the fort, but the soldiers
refused to go out for it. Armed with our guns, my brothers made two
trips outside the walls for our linen. The Iroquois must have thought
it a trick to lure them closer, for they did not approach.

It need scarcely be added that brave mothers make brave sons, and it is
not surprising that twenty-five years later, when Madeline Vercheres
had become the wife of M. de La Naudiere, her own life was saved from
Abenaki Indians by her little son, age twelve.

But to return to Count Frontenac, marching up the steep streets of
Quebec to Chateau St. Louis that October evening of 1689, amid the
jubilant shouts of friends and enemies, Jesuit and Recollet, fur trader
and councilor,--the haughty Governor set himself