If the two English parties came together, Radisson was lost. He must beat them singly before they met; and again putting on a bold face, he marched out, met his former associates, and as a friend advised them not to ascend the river farther. Fortunately for Radisson, both Gillam and Bridgar, the Hudson's Bay governor, were drinking heavily and glad to take his advice. The winter passed, with Radisson perpetrating such tricks on his rivals as a player might with the dummy men on a chessboard; but the chessboard, with the English rivals for pawns, was suddenly upset by the unexpected. Young Gillam discovered that Radisson had no fort at all,--only log cabins with a handful of ragamuffin bushrovers; and Captain Gillam senior got word of young Gillam's presence. Radisson had to act, act quickly, and on the nail. Leaving half a dozen men as hostages in young Gillam's fort, Radisson invited the youth to visit the French fort for which the young Boston fellow had expressed such skeptical scorn. To make a long story short, young Gillam was no sooner out of his own fort than the French hostages took peaceable possession of it, and Gillam was no sooner in Radisson's fort than the French clapped him a prisoner in their guardroom. Ignorant that the French had captured young Gillam's fort, the Hudson's Bay Company men had marched upstream at dead of night to his {150} rescue. The English knocked for admittance. The French guards threw open the gates. In marched the English traders. The French clapped the gates to. The English were now themselves prisoners. Such a double victory would have been impossible to the French if the Hudson's Bay Company men had not fuddled themselves with drink and allowed their fine ship, the _Prince Rupert_, to be wrecked in the ice drive. In spring the ice jam wrecked Radisson's vessels, too, so he was compelled to send the most of his prisoners in a sloop down Hudson Bay to Prince Rupert, while he carried the rest with him on young Gillam's ship down to Quebec with an enormous cargo of furs.