wo captured priests stood bound to the torture stakes,
the gapingstock of a thousand fiends. When the Iroquois singed Brebeuf
from head to foot with burning birch bark, he threatened them in tones
of thunder with everlasting damnation for persecuting the servants of
God. The Iroquois shrieked with laughter. Such spirit in a man was to
their liking. Then, to stop his voice, they cut away his lips and
rammed a red-hot iron into his mouth. Not once did the giant priest
flinch or writhe at the torture stake. Then they brought out Lalemant,
that Brebeuf might suffer the agony of seeing a weaker spirit flinch.
Poor Lalemant fell at his superior's feet, sobbing out a verse of
Scripture. Then they wreathed Lalemant in oiled bark and set fire to
it.

"We baptize you," they yelled, throwing hot water on the dying man.
Then they railed out blasphemies, obscenities unspeakable, against the
Jesuits' religion. Brebeuf had not winced, but his frame was relaxing.
He sank to his knees, a dying man. With the yells of devils jealous of
losing their prey, they ripped off his scalp while he was still alive,
tore his heart from his breast, and drank the warm lifeblood of the
priest. Brebeuf died at four in the afternoon. Strange to relate,
Lalemant, of the weaker body, survived the tortures till daybreak,
when, weary of the sport, the Indians desisted from their mad night
orgies and put an end to his sufferings by braining him.

{91} Over at Ste. Marie, Ragueneau and the other priests momentarily
awaited the attack; but at Ste. Marie were forty French soldiers and
ample supply of muskets. The Iroquois was bravest as the wolf is
bravest--when attacking a lamb. Three hundred Hurons lay in ambush
along the forest trail. These ran from the Iroquois like sheep; but
when three hundred more sallied from the fort, led by the French, it
was the Iroquois' turn to run, and they fled back behind the palisades
of St. Louis. The Hurons followed, entered by the selfsame breaches
the Iroquois had made, and drove the invaders out. More Iroquois
rushed from Ignace to the rescue. A hundred Iroquois fell in the day's
fight, and when they finally recaptured St. Louis, only twenty Hurons
remained of the three hundred. The victory had been bought at too
great cost. Tying their prisoners to stakes at St. Ignace, they heaped
the courtyard with inflammable wood, set fire to all, and retreated,
taking only enough prisoners to carry their plunder.