Fourteen nights they had journeyed stealthily, lying in hiding all the day, for fear of meeting Iroquois on the war-path, and had reached a point but a few miles from Three Rivers, when, venturing to cross Lake St. Peter, a wide expansion of the St. Lawrence, by daylight, they encountered a number of hostile canoes. In vain they turned and paddled their hardest for the shore they had left. The enemy gained on them rapidly and opened fire. At the first discharge the Indian was killed and the canoe was so riddled that it was sinking, when the Iroquois ranged alongside and took Radisson out. {197} Now he was in trouble indeed. No more junketing! No more singing of jolly French songs to amuse his captors, but doleful journeying along with nineteen prisoners, one Frenchman, one Frenchwoman, and seventeen Huron men and women, the latter constantly chanting their mournful death-song. Through the day the poor wretches lay in the canoes, pinioned and trussed like fowls; and at night they were laid on the ground securely fastened to posts, so that they could not move hand or foot, while mosquitoes and flies swarmed about them. When the Iroquois country was reached, they furnished sport to the whole population, which turned out everywhere to greet them with tortures. This time Radisson did not wholly escape. But when, for the second time, he was on the point of running the gauntlet, for the second time his "mother" rescued him. His "father" lectured him roundly on the folly of running away from people who had made him one of the family. Still he exerted himself strenuously to save Radisson from the death penalty which hung over him, and succeeded in securing his release after he had been duly tortured. "Then," he says, "my father goes to seeke {198} rootes, and my sister chaws them and my mother applyes them to my sores as a plaster." After a month of this primitive surgery, he was able to go about again, free. The winter passed quietly and pleasantly. Then Radisson, anxious to show himself a thorough Iroquois, proposed to his "father" to let him go on a war-party. The old brave heartily approved, and the young renegade set off with a band for the Huron country. Now follows a dreary account of the atrocities committed. In the end the party, after perpetrating several murders, encountered a considerable number of the enemy, with the loss of one of their men severely wounded. They burned him, to save him from falling into the enemy's hands, and then fled the country. Their arrival at home, with prisoners and scalps, mostly of women and children, was an occasion of great honor, and Radisson came in for his full share.