“Joseph,” she replied in a hollow voice, “the wolf garou hath devoured our children.” “Never! Thou art mad. There is no wolf garou.” “I leave it all with the good God: I wish there was no wolf garou.” Then she told him of the disappearance of the children and of her vain search. Husband and son listened attentively. “Pooh!” exclaimed Caza, “they are not lost forever to us. Get us breakfast and Jean and I will track them and have them back to thee before long. You do not know how to find and follow a trail.” An hour later, shouldering their rifles, they set forth. The day passed painfully for the poor mother, and it was long after sunset when they returned. They had found no trace of the wanderers. They had met the calves, which, from the mud that covered them, had evidently been in the swamp and floundered there long before they got back to solid land at a point distant from the pasture. The father’s idea was that the children had been stolen by Indians. Next day the search was resumed, the neighbors joining in it. At nightfall all returned baffled, perplexed and disheartened; Caza more confident than before that the Indians were to blame. After a night’s rest, he set off early for St Regis, where he got no information. Leaving there, he scoured the forest along Trout River and the Chateaugay, finding a few hunting-camps, whose dusky inmates denied all knowledge of the missing girls. He pursued his toilsome way to Caughnawaga and came back by the river St Louis without discovering anything to throw light on the fate of his children. The grief of the mother who had been buoying herself with the expectation that he would bring back the truants, is not to be described; and she declared it would be a satisfaction to her to be assured of their death rather than longer endure the burden of suspense. Again the father left to scour the wilderness that lies between the St Lawrence and the foot-hills of the Adirondacks, hoping to find in some wigwam buried in forest-depths the objects of his eager quest. On reaching Lake Champlain he became convinced that the captors were beyond his reach, and, footsore and broken-hearted, he sought his home, to make the doleful report that he had not found the slightest trace. The leaves fluttered from the trees, the snow came in flurries from the north, the nights grew longer and colder, and, at last, winter set in. When the wind came howling across the icy plain into which the St Lawrence had been transformed, and the trees around their shanty groaned and wailed, the simple couple drew closer to the blazing logs and thought sadly of their loved ones, pinched with cold and hunger, in the far-away wigwams of their heartless captors. “They will grow up heathens,” murmured the mother. “Nay, they were baptized,” suggested the father, “and that saves their souls. I hope they are dead rather than living to be abused by the savages.”