THREE weeks after Dollard’s departure Jacques Goffinet took the boat and one Huron Indian whom Dollard had sent back with the boat and set off to Montreal to obey his master’s final order.

No appearances on the river had caused alarm at St. Bernard. While record has not been made of the route taken by the Iroquois brought from the Richelieu, it is evident that they passed north of Montreal island, avoiding settlements.

Montreal was waiting in silence and anxiety for news of the expedition.

The first person whom Jacques encountered was the nuns’ man Jouaneaux, watching the St. Lawrence with uneasy expectation in his eyes.

When they had exchanged greetings as men do when each thinks only of the information he can get from the other, Jouaneaux said:

“You come from up river?”

“From St. Bernard island,” replied Jacques. “What news of the expedition?”

But Jouaneaux had widened his mouth receptively.

“You are then from the commandant Dollard’s seigniory?”

“The commandant is my seignior,” said Jacques.

Jouaneaux laid hold of his sleeve.

“Did Mademoiselle de Granville return to St. Bernard and take the little half-breed Sister with her?”

“Mademoiselle de Granville, my commandant’s sister, is at St. Bernard; yes,” replied Jacques, arrested and stupefied by such inquiries.

“Look you here, my good friend,” exclaimed Jouaneaux. “I speak for the nuns of St. Joseph of the HÔtel-Dieu, where your master put his sister for protection before he set out. Was not her fire built to suit her? We are poor, but our hospitality is free, and we love not to have it flung back in our faces. Still, I say nothing of mademoiselle. She hath her seigniory to look after, and she was not a novice.”

“My master left my lady at the governor’s house,” asserted Jacques.

“But,” continued Jouaneaux, “this I will say: ill did she requite us in that she carried off the novice Massawippa, whose father, the Huron chief, had put her in the HÔtel-Dieu to take vows.”

“I will go to the governor,” threatened Jacques, feeling himself baited.

“And what will it profit thee to go to the governor? The governor is a just man, and he hath the good of the HÔtel-Dieu at heart.”

“I know nothing about your HÔtel-Dieu,” said Jacques, having forebodings at his heart.

“But where is our novice?” persisted Jouaneaux, following him.

“I know nothing about your novice.”

At the governor’s house, by scant questions on his part and much speech on Jouaneaux’s, he learned that Dollard was yet unheard from, that Claire had been left at the hospital, and for some unspoken reason, which Jacques silently accepted as good since it was the commandant’s reason, she had been received as the commandant’s sister; and finally that she had disappeared with a young novice, the daughter of Annahotaha, soon after the expedition left, and no one in Montreal knew anything else about her.

Distressed to muteness by such tidings, Jacques went back to his boat, still followed by Jouaneaux, and pushed off up the river with the malediction of St. Joseph invoked upon him.

As his Huron rowed back along Lake St. Louis they saw a canoe drifting, and cautiously approaching it they found that it held a wounded brave in the war-dress of the Hurons. He lay panting in his little craft, feverish and helpless, and they towed him to the island and carried him up into the seigniory kitchen.

The May sun shone and bees buzzed past the windows; all the landscape and the pleasant world seemed to contradict the existence of such a blot on nature as a blood-streaked man.

The family gathered fearfully about La Mouche as he lay upon a bear-skin brought down from the saloon for him by Joan.

Jacques gave him brandy and Louise bathed his wounds. They used such surgery as they knew, and La Mouche told them all the story of the Long Saut except his desertion. None of five deserters who escaped from the Iroquois, and from the tortures to which the Iroquois put all the deserters after burning the fort, could tell the truth about their own action until long after.

Jacques turned away from this renegade and threw both arms around one of the cemented pillars. Louise fell on her knees beside him, and the broad hall was filled with wailings. There were consolations which Louise remembered when her religion and her stolid sense of duty began reconciling her to the eternal absence of Claire and Dollard. She stood up and took her apron to wipe her good man’s eyes, saying without greediness and merely as seizing on a tangible fact:

“Thou hast the island of St. Bernard left thee.”

“But he that is gone,” sobbed Jacques, “he was to me more than the whole earth.”

The four other Hurons who escaped carried all the details of the battle, except their own desertion, to Montreal. But the Iroquois were not so reticent, and in time this remnant of Hurons was brought to admit that Annahotaha alone of the tribe stood by the Frenchmen to the last.

As for the Iroquois, they slunk back to their own country utterly defeated and confounded. They had no further desire to fight such an enemy. Says the historian,[12] “If seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such fighting behind walls of stone?” The colony of New France was redeemed out of their hands. After the struggle at the Long Saut it enjoyed such a period of rest and peace as the Iroquois had not permitted it for years.

When La Mouche recovered from his wounds he crept away to his cÔte down the river, and with little regret the people on St. Bernard heard of him no more.

Jacques and Louise remained in possession of St. Bernard, and on that island their stout-legged children played, or learned contented thrift, or followed their father in his sowing; their delight being the real priest who came with his glowing altar to teach them religion, and their terror the pretended priest in the top apartment of their house. For Mademoiselle de Granville lived many years, so indulged in her humors that the story went among neighboring seigniories that she had an insane brother whom she imprisoned on St. Bernard out of tenderness towards him, instead of sending him to some asylum in France.[13]

Rather because her memory was a spot of tenderness within themselves always on the point of bleeding, than because of their ignorant dread of law’s intermeddling, Jacques and Louise never told about Dollard’s bride. The marriage had taken place in Quebec. Dollier de Casson, who celebrated it, made no record of the fact in connection with his account of Dollard’s exploit. The jealousies and bickerings then rising high between Quebec and Montreal clouded or misrepresented or suppressed many a transaction. And honest Dollier de Casson, who no doubt learned by priestly methods the fate of the bride, may have seen fit to withhold the luster of her devotion from the name of Laval, since the bishop pressed no inquiries after his impulsive young relative. News stretched slowly to and from France then. Her name dropped out of all records, except the notarial one of her marriage, and a faint old clew which an obscure scribe has left embodying a scarcely credited tale told by the Huron deserters. Without monument, what was once her beautiful body has become grass, flowers, clear air, beside the hoarse rapids. She died, as many a woman has died, silently crowning the deed done by a man, and in her finer immortality can perhaps smile at being forgotten, since it is not by him.

But Dollard has been the darling of his people for more than two and a quarter centuries.

On every midsummer-day, when the festival of St. John the Baptist is kept with pageant, music, banners, and long processions; when thousands choke the streets, and triumphal arch after triumphal arch lifts masses of flowers to the June sun; when invention has taxed itself to carry beautiful living pictures before the multitude—then there is always a tableau to commemorate the heroes of the Long Saut. If young children or if strangers ask, “Who was Dollard?” any Frenchman is ready to answer:

“He was a man of courageous heart;[14] he saved Canada from the Iroquois.”

The dullest soul is stirred to passionate acclamation as the chevalier and his sixteen men go by.

And when we tell our stories, shall we tell them only of the commonplace, the gay, the debonair life of this world? Shall the heroes be forgotten?

THE END.