ades. The young commandant was only twenty-seven
years of age, but he must have guessed whence came the unspoken
hostility. The first miserable winter wears slowly past and the winter
of 1711 is setting in, with the English garrison even more poverty
stricken than the year before, when there drifts into Annapolis Basin,
in a birch canoe paddled by a New Brunswick Indian, a white woman with
her little son. She has come, she says, from the north side of Fundy
Bay, because the French {202} on St. John River are starving. Whether
the story be true or false matters little. It was the Widow Freneuse,
the snake woman of mischief-making witchery, who had woven her spells
round the officers in the days of the French at Port Royal. True or
false, her story, added to her smile, excited sympathy, and she was
welcomed to the shelter of the fort. It had been almost impossible for
the English to obtain trees to repair the walls of the fort, and
seventy English soldiers were sent out secretly by night to paddle up
the river in a whaleboat for timber. Who conveyed secret warning of
this expedition to the French bushraiders outside? No doubt the fair
spy, Widow Freneuse, could have told if she would; but five miles from
Port Royal, where the river narrowed to a place ever since known as
Bloody Brook, a crash of musket shots flared from the woods on each
side. Painted Indians, and Frenchmen dressed as Indians, among whom
was a son of Widow Freneuse, dashed out. Sixteen English were killed,
nine wounded, the rest to a man captured, to be held for ransoms
ranging from 10 pounds to 50 pounds. Oddly enough, the very night
after the attack, before news of it had come to Annapolis, the Widow
Freneuse disappears from the fort. Henceforth Paul Mascarene's men
kept guard night and day, and slept in their boots. Ever like a
sinister shadow of evil moved St. Castin and his raiders through the
Acadian wildwoods.

Only one thing prevented the French recapturing Port Royal at this
time. All troops were required to defend Quebec itself from invasion.

Nicholson's success at Port Royal spurred England and her American
colonies to a more ambitious project,--to capture Quebec and subjugate
Canada. This time Nicholson was to head twenty-five hundred provincial
troops by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, while a British
army of twelve thousand, half soldiers, half marines, on fifteen
frigates and forty-six transports, was to sail