Quebec has fallen. As jackals gather to feast on the carcass of the dead lion, so rallies a rabble of adventurers on the trail of the victorious army. Sutlers, traders, teamsters, riffraff,--soldiers of fortune,--stampede to Montreal and Quebec as to a new gold field. When Major Robert Rogers, the English forest ranger, proceeds up the lakes to take over the western fur posts,--Presqu' Isle, Detroit, Michilimackinac,--he is followed by hosts of adventurers looking for swift way to fortune by either the fur trade or by picking the bones of the dead lion. Major Rogers, beating up Lake Ontario and Lake Erie with two hundred bushwhackers, pausing in camp near modern Sandusky, meets the renowned Ottawa warrior, Pontiac, who had fought with the French against Braddock and now wants to know in voice of thunder what all this talk about the French being conquered means; how _dare_ the French, because _they_ have proved paltroons, deed away the Indian lands of Canada? How dare Rogers, the white chief of the English rangers, come here with his pale-faced warriors to Pontiac's land? How Rogers answered the veteran red-skinned warrior is not told. All that is known is--the French gave up their western furs with bad grace, and the English commandants forgot to appease the wound to the Indians' pride by the customary gifts over solemn powwow. At Detroit and Michilimackinac the French quietly withdraw from the palisades and build their white-washed cottages outside the limits of the fort--2500 French habitants there are at Detroit. If the four or five hundred English adventurers who swarmed to Canada on the heels of the English army thought to batten on the sixty thousand defeated French inhabitants, far otherwise thought and decreed the English generals, Sir Jeffrey {277} Amherst, and Murray, who succeeded him. "You will observe that the French are British subjects as much as we are, and treat them accordingly," ruled Amherst; and General Murray, who practically became the first governor of Canada on Amherst's withdrawal, at once set himself to establish justice. [Illustration: MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS]