eague with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and
escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the
Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape

Early one morning in the spring of 1652 three young men left the little
stockaded fort of Three Rivers, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence,
for a day's hunting in the marshes of Lake St. Peter. On one side were
the forested hills, purple with the mists of rising vapor and still
streaked with white patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the
sunlight. On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence,
more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of
rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese
flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just
as they do to-day. Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice
poured their spring flood into the St. Lawrence.

The hunters were very young. Only hunters rash with the courage of
untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all
the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the
little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year.
Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three
Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois.
The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had
been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in
the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France. It was from
Three Rivers that Piescaret, the famous Algonquin chief who could
outrun a deer, had set out against the Iroquois, turning his snowshoes
back to front, so that the track seemed to lead north when he was
really going south, and then, having thrown his pursuers off the trail,
coming back on his own footsteps, slipping up stealthily on the
Iroquois that were following the false scent, and tomahawking the
laggards.[1] It was from Three Rivers that the Mohawks had captured
the Algonquin girl who escaped by slipping off the thongs that bound
her. Stepping over the prostrate forms of her sleeping guards, such a
fury of revenge possessed her that she seized an axe and brained the
nearest sleeper, then eluded her pursuers by first hiding in a hollow
tree and afterward diving under the debris of a beaver dam.

[Illustration: Three Rivers in 1757.]

These things were known to every