Dawn was breaking when they reached Scaith's camp. They found several men very busy, but they stopped a moment when the party came up. "You have to get off the ground!" ordered one of the men from the Landing. "The sooner you quit the better for you!" "We're going," was the sullen answer. "I reckon we know when you've got the best of us." "Then," said the other man, "we'll wait till you start--and we won't wait long!" Shortly afterward Scaith's party took the trail to the south, and as there were six of them Joe concluded that his first assailant had not been seriously damaged by his fall into the ravine. When they had gone, one of the new arrivals turned to Joe. "Carnally and Graham should be here before night," he said. "They were getting ready to come up when we left. Jake allowed he wanted to be on the ground." CHAPTER XXX THE EVE OF BATTLE It was evening when the big liner which had left Montreal at daybreak steamed slowly past the ramparts of Quebec, the roar of her whistle echoing among the rocks. The tide which had floated her across the shoals of Lake St. Peter was running low, the great river was unruffled, and Andrew leaned on her saloon-deck rails, watching the city open up as she swung inshore with the slack stream. Behind the wharves and warehouses at the waterside old buildings and loftier modern ones, stores, banks and churches, rose in picturesque confusion, tier above tier, to the heights girdled by Dufferin Avenue, and the huge Frontenac Hotel. It struck him as a beautiful city, viewed from the river, but it bore an exotic stamp. In spite of the sooty smoke of the locomotives and the rattle of steamboat winches, it had a stronger resemblance to the old romantic towns of France than the business centers of essentially modern Canada.