colours high and hurrahed.

"Forward! Forward, Forty-sixth!"

Then, as a dozen men heaved themselves on to the parapet, a fiery
pang gripped him by the chest, and the night--so long held back--came
suddenly, swooping on him from all corners of the sky at once.
The grip of his knees relaxed. The sergeant, leaping, caught the
standard in the nick of time, as the limp body slid and dropped
within the rampart.

CHAPTER IV.

THE VOYAGEURS.

Fringue, fringue sur la riviere;
Fringue, fringue sur l'aviron!

The man at the bow paddle set the chorus, which was taken up by boat
after boat. John, stretched at the bottom of a canoe with two
wounded Highlanders, wondered where he had heard the voice before.
His wits were not very clear yet. The canoe's gunwale hid all the
landscape but a mountain-ridge high over his right, feathered with
forest and so far away that, swiftly as the strokes carried him
forward, its serrated pines and notches of naked rock crept by him
inch by inch. He stared at these and prayed for the moment when the
sun should drop behind them. For hours it had been beating down on
him. An Indian sat high in the stern, steering; paddling
rhythmically and with no sign of effort except that his face ran with
sweat beneath its grease and vermilion. But not a feature of it
twitched in the glare across which, hour after hour, John had been
watching him through scorched eyelashes.

Athwart the stern, and almost at the Indian's feet, reclined a brawn
of a man with his knees drawn high--a French sergeant in a
spick-and-span white tunic with the badge of the Bearnais regiment.
A musket lay across his thighs, so pointed that John looked straight
down its barrel. Doubtless it was loaded: but John had plenty to
distract his thoughts from such a trifle--in the heat, the glare, the
torment of his wounds, and, worst of all, the incessant coughing of
the young Highlander beside him. The lad had been shot through the
lungs, and the wound imperfectly bandaged. A horrible wind issued
from it with every cough.

How many men might be seated or lying in the fore part of the canoe
John could not tell, being unable to turn his head. Once or twice a
guttural voice there growled a word of comfort to the dying lad, in
Gaelic or in broken English. And always the bowman sang high and
clear, setting the chorus for the attendant boats, and from the
chorus passing without a break into the solo. "En roulant