ter room, where scarcely a
voice stirred among the sleepy soldiery, but from the top row of bunks.
Marie turned white at this child wail soothed by a woman's voice.

"What have we here?" exclaimed La Tour.

"Monsieur, it must be a baby!"

"Who has broken into this post with a baby? There may be men concealed
overhead."

He grasped his pistols, but no men-at-arms appeared with the haggard
woman who crept down from her hiding-place near the joists.

"Are you some spy sent from D'Aulnay?" inquired La Tour.

"Monsieur, how can you so accuse a poor outcast mother!" whispered
Marie.

The door in the partition was flung wide, and the young officer appeared
with men at his back.

"Have you found an ambush, Sieur Charles?"

"We have here a listener, Edelwald," replied La Tour, "and there may be
more in the loft above."

Several men sprang up the bunks and moved some puncheons overhead. A
light was raised under the dark roof canopy, but nothing rewarded its
search. The much-bedraggled woman was young, with falling strands of
silken hair, which she wound up with one hand while holding the baby.
Marie took the poor wailer from her with a divine motion and carried it
to the hearth.

"Who brought you here?" demanded La Tour of the girl.

She cowered before him, but answered nothing. Her presence seemed to him
a sinister menace against even his obscurest holdings in Acadia. The
stockade was easily entered, for La Tour was unable to maintain a
garrison there. All that open country lay sodden with the breath of the
sea. From whatever point she had approached, La Tour could scarcely
believe her feet came tracking the moist red clay alone.

"Will you give no account of yourself?"

"You must answer monsieur," encouraged Marie, turning, from her cares
with the child. It lay unwound from its misery on Marie's knees,
watching the new ministering power with accepting eyes. Feminine and
piteous as the girl was, her dense resistance to command could only vex
a soldier.

"Put her under guard," he said to his officer.

"And Zelie must look to her comfort," added Marie.

"Whoever she may be," declared La Tour, "she hath heard too much to go
free of this place. She must be sent in the ship to Fort St. John, and
guarded there."

"What else could be done, indeed?" asked Marie. "The child would die of
exposure here."

The prisoner was taken to the other hearth; and the young officer, as he
closed the door, half smiled to hear