When they had us at the water’s edge, the seven Indians stripped off their shirts, swung their North canoe into the lake and neatly stowed their fur robes, muskets, mats of woven rushes and other belongings amidships.

“Well,” I said to Doc and Verrieul, “God knows how this happened to us, but I feel somehow it’s my fault for having known Lanaudiere in the past.”

“To be frank with you,” Verrieul said, “I felt it was my fault for bragging concerning our abilities.”

Doc eyed us pathetically. “No, it ain’t nobody’s fault, only England’s. If she hadn’t nired these red weasels to fight us, we’d be all right.” He hitched his bundle-filled smock into an easier position, and looked appraisingly at Sponge-belly. “I dunno but what I could get along with these people all right, if only they didn’t smell. They got a way of smelling I can’t seem to like.”

“For our sakes,” Verrieul warned him, “I hope you’ll try to like it. They’re gentle with you now, because you, too, have a powerful smell, and they think you’re as powerful as your smell. Have you never seen a dog proud of himself because he has rolled in a long-dead fish, and respectful of another dog that has rolled in a fish even longer dead? That is how they look upon you; but they’re quick to change their minds if you displease them, and you’re sure to displease them if you talk so much.”

“I don’t believe it,” Doc said. “Don’t they do a lot of talking themselves?”

“Well,” I said, “we’ll be in Montreal in three days, and I don’t believe they’ll lose interest in Doc in such a short time.”

Sponge-belly urged us toward the canoe. At Verrieul’s suggestion we wiped our feet carefully before we stepped in to seat ourselves on the bottom between the paddlers on their little seats.

Sponge-belly pushed us off with his steering paddle. The six paddlers grunted—“Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh!” Their paddles rose and fell in time to their grunting, and so swiftly did the canoe slide northward that I told myself we might reach Montreal in less than three days.

… We never saw Montreal, except as a jumble of houses on the far side of the St. Lawrence.

I hadn’t thought, when I talked with Lanaudiere, that the day would soon come when Montreal would seem a desirable town, close to my friends and everything I held dear; yet that was how it seemed when our canoe, skirting the southern bank of the river, drove all too swiftly past the high island on which the town is built.