“There’s no telling. You can’t catch ’em. They act as if all hell was after ’em.”

Nason’s reply was both short and sudden. “We’ll move tomorrow. We’ll burn the clothes and the cabin after breakfast, and then we’ll wash up and go.” He looked doubtfully at Verrieul, who was lying back, his eyes closed, a thin seraph in the firelight. “You’ll have to put this young man on your horse and carry him to the first settlement, so he can have help until he’s able to start for Hanover.”

“There’s nothing to hinder him making his own way,” Doc Means said. “I’ll have him walking by morning.”

At the weary weakness of Doc’s voice, Verrieul sat up to stare solicitously at him. Then he smiled fondly. “I’m in no hurry to return to Hanover. I’ve taken a notion to go along with you for a time. It might be I could be useful.”

It was apparent to all of us that he could indeed be useful; but how useful he was to be, we couldn’t dream. Nor had we even a slight suspicion that our meeting with Joseph Marie Verrieul was the last piece of good fortune that was to come our way for many a long day.

IX

AT ALLEN’S LANDING, where the Winooski River flows into Lake Champlain, there was little besides a sawmill and a gristmill, and a store run by one of the Allens that are almost as plentiful in the Hampshire grants as Starks in New Hampshire. Here we took possession of two canoes for which Cap, during his absence from our smallpox camp, had arranged to trade his horse and frying pans. They were ancient relics, the bark gone in patches and the pitch over their seams black and broken with age, so that they looked about as seaworthy as corn-cribs.

Nason and Verrieul, however, commended Cap for acquiring them. They were North canoes, Verrieul said, made by Indians far to the northwest, beyond Lake Superior; so they must have been brought here and abandoned by traders. To me they seemed unwieldy and too large; but Verrieul said No: they were snug and tidy, easy to handle by comparison with Master canoes, which are forty feet long, manned by fourteen paddlers: yet they were heavy enough for lake travel, unlike the twenty-foot half-canoes to which eastern pork-eaters like ourselves are accustomed. They were nine paces long, and two paces wide, accommodating eleven men—a lookout in the bow, a steersman standing in the stern, six middlemen with paddles on the three thwarts amidships, and three passengers.