One other item has to be mentioned in the description of this year's doings. A gallant Moravian missionary, one Post by name, offered to undertake a journey to the Ohio Indians, who, led by the French, had for so long been harrying our Alleghany frontiers. This brave man went not once only, but twice to these people, at the risk of almost certain torture and death, and finally persuaded the fierce braves to give up their alliance with the French, to cease their slaughter, and to bury the hatchet with the six nations. For the tide of war was changing. The tale of Frontenac, and of Louisbourg, had reached to the farthest wigwams, and no Indian existed who did not desire above all things to be on the winning side, the side to which most reward and plunder would come. Thus our generals found themselves with a huge weight off their minds. Ticonderoga still existed, and it alone barred our advance up those lakes, St. George and Champlain, to Canada itself. The winter of 1758 found Pitt with another policy, pushing on his preparations for carrying it out when the spring should have come to break up the ice in the mighty St. Lawrence. Quebec was to be the objective, and Brigadier-General Wolfe, the silent, active leader, was to command. Nor was Steve to be left out of the expedition, for hardly had the month of May, 1759, come when a message reached him. "To Captain Steve Mainwaring," it read, "From General Wolfe. Please make it convenient to travel to New York at the earliest date, and from there join the fleet making for Quebec. I have urgent need of your services." Steve packed his clothing, took Jim and Mac and his father with him, and set off at once, eager to see again the fair city in which he had been so long a prisoner. Chapter XIX Wolfe makes his Last Attempt "Listen to that, boys. There is music for you," said Mr. Mainwaring some weeks after he, Steve, and the two trappers had set out for New York. "Listen to our guns, and do not say after this that we shall be too late. Quebec is not to be taken in a day. The city is one of the very strongest, and has a big army to defend it. I said long ago that we should be in time to see and take part in the crowning act of this campaign." "And you've stuck to that through thick and thin, Judge," chimed in Jim, standing at the rail of the ship, and looking his old self again, for the hunter was dressed at this moment just as he had been on that day when we first made his acquaintance. Steve, too, was in his trapper's clothing, looking taller and broader now after his many months of campaigning, and bearing on his face more character perhaps than ever before, for the anxieties of command had developed the natural self-assurance which he had possessed from the first.