"That's the way to talk, now!" said Jules.
"Listen to the irrepressible," retorted Marcheterre.
As it was now very late, the party broke up, after drinking the health of the old sailor and his son and pronouncing the eulogies they deserved for the part they had played that night.
The young men had to stay some days at St. Thomas. The flood continued. The roads were deluged. The nearest bridge, even supposing it had escaped the general disaster, was some leagues southwest of the village, and the rain came down in torrents. They were obliged to wait till the river should be clear of ice, so as to cross in a boat below the falls. They divided their time between the seigneur's family, their other friends, and poor Dumais, whom the seigneur would not permit to be moved. The sick man entertained them with stories of his fights against the English and their savage allies, and with accounts of the manners and customs of the aborigines.
"Although I am a native of St. Thomas," said Dumais one day, "I was brought up in the parish of Sorel. When I was ten years old and my brother nine, while we were in the woods one day picking raspberries a party of Iroquois surprised and captured us. After a long march, we came to the place where their canoe was hidden among the brambles by the water's edge; and they took us to one of the islands of the St. Lawrence. My father and his three brothers, armed to the teeth, set out to rescue us. They were only four against ten; but I may say without boasting that my father and my uncles were not exactly the kind of men to be trifled with. They were tall, broad-chested fellows, with their shoulders well set back.
"It might have been about ten o'clock in the evening. My brother and I, surrounded by our captors, were seated in a little clearing in the midst of thick woods, when we heard my father's voice shouting to us: 'Lie flat down on your stomachs.' I immediately seized my little brother around the neck and flattened him down to the ground with me. The Iroquois were hardly on their feet when four well-aimed shots rang out and four of the band fell squirming like eels. The rest of the vermin, not wishing, I suppose, to fire at hazard against the invisible enemies to whom they were serving as targets, started for the shelter of the trees; but our rescuers gave them no time. Falling upon them with the butts of their muskets, they beat down three at the first charge, and the others saved themselves by flight. Our mother almost died of joy when we were given back to her arms."