of delight by the
Iroquois; and the high-spirited boy was given in adoption to a captive
Huron woman.

Things would have gone well had he not bungled an attempt to escape;
but one night, while in camp with three Iroquois hunters, an Algonquin
captive entered. While the Iroquois {96} slept with guns stacked
against the trees, the sleepless Algonquin captive rose noiselessly
where he lay by the fire, seized the Mohawk warriors' guns, threw one
tomahawk across to Radisson, and with the other brained two of the
sleepers. The French boy aimed a blow at the third sleeper, and the
two captives escaped. But they might have saved themselves the
trouble. They were pursued and overtaken on Lake St. Peter, within
sight of Three Rivers. This time Radisson had to endure all the
_diableries_ of Mohawk torture. For two days he was kept bound to the
torture stake. The nails were torn from his fingers, the flesh burnt
from the soles of his feet, a hundred other barbarous freaks of impish
Indian children wreaked on the French boy. Arrows with flaming points
were shot at his naked body. His mutilated finger ends were ground
between stones, or thrust into the smoking bowl of a pipe full of
coals, or bitten by fiendish youngsters being trained up the way a
Mohawk warrior should go.

[Illustration: A CANADIAN IN SNOWSHOES (After La Potherie)]

Radisson's youth, his courage, his very dare-devil rashness, together
with presents of wampum belts from his Indian parents, {97} saved his
life for a second time, and a year of wild wanderings with Mohawk
warriors finally brought him to Albany on the Hudson, where the Dutch
would have ransomed him as they had ransomed the two Jesuits, Jogues
and Poncet; but the boy disliked to break faith a second time with his
loyal Indian friends. Still, the glimpse of white man's life caused a
terrible upheaval of revulsion from the barbarities, the filth, the
vice, of the Mohawk camp. He could endure Indian life no longer. One
morning, in the fall of 1653, he stole out from the Mohawk lodges,
while the mist of day dawn still shadowed the forest, and broke at a
run down the trail of the Mohawk valley for Albany. All day he ran,
pursued by the phantom fright of his own imagination, fancying
everything that crunched beneath his moccasined tread some Mohawk
warrior, seeing in the branches that reeled as he passed the arms of
pursuers stretched out to stop him;--on . . . and on . . . and on, he
ran, pa