A slender, wiry little man in a wig several sizes too big for him
strode into the room. He had a thin face, near-sighted eyes and a
bulging forehead. He favored me with a curious glance, nodded to
Joncaire and took a seat across the table from me.
My host made a wry smile and motioned to François to bring a third
mug.
"Hola, Monsieur de Lery," he said. "This is a gallant young
forest-runner, one Jean Courbevoir, who has come to tell me that
charming idiot Alphonse de Tonty has been chased out of Le de Troit
by the Messesagues. Jean, Monsieur de Lery is the King's engineer
officer in Canada."
"Another case of a log fortification, I suppose," remarked de Lery
sarcastically in a dry, crackling voice.
He paid no attention to the introduction to me.
"You gentlemen will never learn," he added.
"You must think we grow louis d'or instead of furs in Canada,"
growled Joncaire. "Be sure, we of the wilderness posts are the most
anxious to have stone walls around us. Well, what headway have you
made?"
"I have traced out the lines of the central mass," replied de Lery,
taking a gulp of the wine. "Tomorrow I shall mark out a surrounding
work of four bastions to encompass it."
"And you insist it shall be at the confluence of the river and the
lake?"
"There can be no doubt 'tis the proper spot," declared de Lery
didactically, "both from the engineering and the strategical points
of view."
"But I am telling you--I, Louis Thomas de Joncaire, Sieur de Chabert,
who have been thirty-five years in this accursed country--that if you
do so you will have no sheltered anchorage for shipping. Moreover,
you will sacrifice the buildings we have erected here."
De Lery pushed back his mug.
"All very well," he answered; "but your position here does not
command the lake. If the English chose they could blockade you in
the river, and your anchorage would go for naught. Furthermore,
there is great difficulty in navigating craft this far up the river
against a current of nearly three leagues an hour."
"Bah!" exclaimed Joncaire. "You know everything."
"I am an engineer," returned de Lery pompously. "You are a soldier.
I should not attempt to dictate to you."
Joncaire appealed to me. He was on his third mug of wine, and the
mellow stuff had rekindled his odd friendship for me.
"Come, _mon Jean_," he cried, "what do you say to it! You are a man
of experience. You have been to Arles. I think you implied that you
had seen service in the Army in France?"
"As a sergeant only, _monsieur_," I answered modestly. "In the
Regiment de la Reine."
"A famous corps," he proclaimed. "Your opinion has weight with me,
Jean. You are a man of sense and judgment. What is your opinion on
this subject we debate?"
"_Ma foi, monsieur,_" I said cautiously, "I am scarcely fitted to
discuss it with two gentlemen of your wisdom and experience. I am
frank to say I do not understand the issue."
"De Lery, we will leave the matter to this youth's honest candor,"
suggested Joncaire.
"With your favor, _monsieur_, we will not," replied the engineer
decisively.
He rose from his seat.
"Speaking for myself, I have had sufficient wine, and I shall retire.
If the masons bring in the loads of stone we expect in the morning,
we shall be able to lay the first course by noon."
Joncaire twisted his face into a grimace as de Lery ascended a steep
flight of ladder-stairs to an upper story.
"What a man to live with!" he apostrophized. "_Mon Dieu_, nobody
knows the agonies I suffer! Me, I am a man of compassion, of
friendliness, of respect for another's opinion. But that
man--_tonnerrr-rrr-rr-re de Dieu_! For him there are no opinions but
his own."
"What is the difficulty, _monsieur_?" I inquired sympathetically.
"Why, at last I have persuaded this stupid, timorous government of
ours to build me a proper fort. 'Tis the only way we shall hold the
_sacré_ English in check.
"You have intelligence, Jean. You know the country to the West.
'Tis manifest that with a fort here we can control in some measure
the intercourse betwixt the western tribes and the English. Also, we
shall have a constant threat here to keep the Iroquois at peace."
"That is readily understood, monsieur."
"Of course. Well, I worked up Vaudreuil to approve it, obtained the
grants from Paris, secured the necessary mechanics--and then they
sent this popinjay to supervise the work. I had pitched on this site
here. He would have none of it. No, he must overturn all my plans
and put the new works several miles down the river where it runs into
the lake.
"And he will not listen to reason. He is so conceited with himself
because he has been charged with all the works of fortification in
Canada."
"Are there others then, _monsieur_?" I asked casually, burying my
nose in the wine-mug.
"Aye, to be sure. He is to build a wall around Montreal, and to
strengthen the _enceinte_ of Quebec."
"But we are at peace with these _sacré_ English," I objected.
Joncaire, now thoroughly convivial, winked at me over the rim of his
mug.
"For the present, yes. But how long, Jean? Ah, my lad, you are
young, and I can see you have the brains to carry you far. Here in
Canada family counts for less than in Paris. But after all you are
not of those who know the high politics of the day--not yet."
"I am a poor, ignorant youth whom _monsieur_ is pleased to honor," I
said humbly.
"And _monsieur_ is pleased to instruct you," he answered. "Yes, we
can not go on as we have been, Jean. Every year that passes the
English grow in strength, and we become weaker; I speak now in
matters of trade; for after all, lad, the country which obtains the
mastery in trade must be the military master of any contending
nation. I may be only a simple soldier, but so much I have learned."
"Ah, but _monsieur_ is pleased to be down-hearted!" I cried. "'Tis
plain we are stronger than the English. Are not our posts stretched
thousands of miles beyond theirs?"
"Pouf! What of that? We are a colony of soldiers and traders, well
armed and disciplined. They are an infinitely larger group of
colonies with only a few soldiers and traders, but many husbandmen.
Give them time, and they will obtain such a grip on the soil of the
wilderness that they can not be pried loose. But if we use our
temporary advantage, and keep them from winning supremacy in the
trade with the savages, then, my Jean, we may force a war upon them
at an early day, and we shall win."
He sat back, and eyed me triumphantly.
"Surely we have that supremacy now!"
He winked at me again, and drew from a drawer in the table a heavy
book such as accounts are kept in.
"Jean," he said, "I am about to disclose to you a secret--which is
not a secret, because every trader who works for himself is
acquainted with it."
He flipped through the pages.
"Here is the account for this post for the year just ended. We
handled a total of 204 'green' deerskins and 23 packets of various
kinds of furs. On these we cleared a profit of 2,382 livres, 3 sols,
9 deniers,[1] which would not come anywhere near covering the
operating expenses of the post. You will find the same story at
every post from here to the Mississippi."
[1] About $476.
"Why, _monsieur_?"
"These _sacré_ English! First they turn the Iroquois against us--and
in that success, I am bound to say, they have been ably assisted by
ourselves;[2] then they build the post of Fort Oswego, at the foot of
the Onondaga's River on Irondequoit Bay;[3] then they send out a
swarm of young men to trap and shoot in the Indian country; then they
pass this accursed law that forbids us obtaining Indian goods from
the New York merchants! _Peste_, what a people! They have us in a
noose."
[2] Joncaire was one of the few Frenchmen who had the confidence of
the Iroquois. He had been captured as a young man by the Senecas and
adopted into that tribe.
[3] Now Oswego, N.Y.