Such a repast no savage had ever enjoyed in the memory of the race. All the ambushed spies flocked in from the portages. {102} The painted warriors washed off their grease, donned their best buckskin, and rallied to the banquet as to battle. All the stock but one solitary pig, a few chickens and dogs, had been slaughtered for the kettle. Such an odor of luscious meat steamed up from the fort for days as whetted the warriors' hunger to the appetite of ravenous wolves. Finally, one night, the trumpets blew a blare that almost burst eardrums. Fifes shrilled, and the rub-a-dub-dub of a dozen drums set the air in a tremor. A great fire had been kindled between the inner and outer walls that set shadows dancing in the forest. Then the gates were thrown open, and in trooped the feasters. All the French acting as waiters, the whites carried in the kettles--kettles of wild fowl, kettles of oxen, kettles of dogs, kettles of porridge and potatoes and corn and what not? That is it--what not? Were the kettles drugged? Who knows? The feasters ate till their eyes were rolling lugubriously; and still the kettles came round. The Indians ate till they were torpid as swollen corpses, and still came the white men with more kettles, while the mischievous French lad, Radisson, danced a mad jig, shouting, yelling, "Eat! eat! Beat the drum! Awake! awake! Cheer up! Eat! eat!" By midnight every soul of the feast had tumbled over sound asleep, and at the rear gates were the French, stepping noiselessly, speaking in whispers, launching their boats loaded with provisions and ammunition. The soldiers were for going back and butchering every warrior, but the Jesuits forbade such treachery. Then Radisson, light-spirited as if the refugees had been setting out on a holiday, perpetrated yet a last trick on the warriors. To the bell rope of the main gate he fastened a pig, so when the Indians would pull the rope for admission, they would hear the tramp of a sentry inside. Then he stuffed effigies of men on guard round the windows of the fort. It was a pitchy, sleety night, the river roaring with the loose ice of spring flood, the forests noisy with the boisterous March wind. Out on the maelstrom of ice and flood launched the fifty-three colonists, March 20, 1658. By April they were safe {103} inside the walls of Quebec, and chance hunters brought word that what with sleep, and the measured tramp, tramp of the pig, and the baying of the dogs, and the clucking of the chickens inside the fort, the escape of the whites had not been discovered for a week. The Indians thought the whites had gone into retreat for especially long prayers. Then a warrior climbed the inner palisades, and rage knew no bounds. The fort was looted and burnt to the ground.