using neither to eat nor rest; here dashing into the bed of a
stream and running along the pebbled bottom to throw pursuers off the
trail; there breaking through a thicket of brushwood away from the
trail, only to come back to it breathless farther on, when some alarm
of the wind in the trees or deer on the move had proved false. Only
muscles of iron strength, lithe as elastic, could have endured the
strain. Nightfall at last came, hiding him from pursuers; but still he
sped on at a run, following the trail by the light of the stars and the
rush of the river. By sunrise of the second day he was staggering; for
the rocks were slippery with frost and his moccasins worn to tatters.
It was four in the afternoon before he reached the first outlying cabin
of the Dutch settlers. For three days he lay hidden in Albany behind
sacks of wheat in a thin-boarded attic, through the cracks of which he
could see the Mohawks searching everywhere. The Jesuit Poncet gave him
passage money to take ship to Europe by way of New York. New York was
then a village of a few hundred houses, thatch-roofed, with stone fort,
stone church, stone barracks. Central Park was a rocky wilderness.
What is now Wall Street was the stamping ground of pigs and goats.
January of 1654 Radisson {98} reached Europe, no longer a boy, but a
man inured to danger and hardships and daring, though not yet eighteen.

When Radisson came back to Three Rivers in May he found changes had
taken place in New France. Among the men murdered with the Governor of
Three Rivers by the Mohawks the preceding year had been his sister's
husband, and the widow had married one Medard Chouart de Groseillers,
who had served in the Huron country as a lay helper with the martyred
Jesuits. Also a truce had been patched up between the Iroquois and the
French. The Iroquois were warring against the Eries and wanted arms
from the French. A still more treacherous motive underlay the
Iroquois' peace. They wanted a French settlement in their country as a
guarantee of non-intervention when they continued to raid the refugee
Hurons. Such duplicity was unsuspected by New France. The Jesuits
looked upon the peace as designed by Providence to enable them to
establish missions among the Iroquois. Father Le Moyne went from
village to village preaching the gospel and receiving belts of wampum
as tokens of peace--one belt containing as many as seven thousand
beads. When the Onondagas asked fo