ult-au-Matelot barrier," said McQuarters,
nodding his head in the direction of the musketry.

"We've raked decks here, anyhow," Captain Barnsfare commented,
peering down the road; and one or two Canadians volunteered to
descend and explore the palisade. For a while Captain Chabot
demurred, fearing that the Americans might have withdrawn around the
angle of the cliff and be holding themselves in ambush there.

"A couple of us could make sure of that," urged John. "They have
left their wounded, at all events, as you may hear by the groans.
With your leave, Captain--"

Captain Chabot yielded the point, and John with a corporal and a
drummer descended the pass.

A dozen bodies lay heaped by the palisade. For the moment he could
not stay to attend to them, but, passing through, followed the road
down to the end of its curve around the cliff. Two corpses lay here
of men who, mortally wounded, had run with the crowd before dropping
to rise no more. The tracks in the snow told plainly enough that the
retreat had been a stampede.

Returning to the palisade he shouted up that the coast was clear, and
fell to work searching the faces of the fallen. The fresh snow, in
which they lay deep, had already frozen about them; and his eye, as
he swung the lantern slowly round, fell on a hand and arm which stood
up stiffly above the white surface.

He stepped forward, flashing his lantern on the dead man's face--and
dropped on his knees beside it.

"Do you know him, sir?" McQuarters' voice was speaking, close by.

"I know him," answered John dully, and groped and found a thin blade
which lay beside the corpse. "He was my cousin, and once my best
friend."

He felt the edge of the sword with his gloved hand, all the while
staring at the arm pointing upwards and fixed in the rigor of death,
frozen in its last gesture as Richard Montgomery had lifted it to
wave forward his men. And as if the last thirty or forty minutes had
never been, he found himself saying to McQuarters:

"We have come around by strange roads, sergeant, and some of us have
parted with much on the way."

He looked up; but his gaze, travelling past McQuarters who stooped
over the corpse, fell on the figure of a woman who had approached and
halted at three paces' distance; a hooded figure in the dress of the
Hospitalieres.

Something in her attitude told him that she had heard. He arose,
holding the lantern high; and stared, shaking, into a face which n