Johnston and his followers had many disguises. In their attacks on isolated farm-houses it was their pleasure to adopt the dress of ordinary sailors, and in their expedition to the island of Tanti--a Canadian possession of Lord Mountcashel, from which they took much plunder, and where they left one farmer with three fingers and part of a hand shot off--the whole _mise-en-scène_ is absurdly like “H. M. S. _Pinafore_.” From island to island, from rock to the hidden fastness, keeping in the narrower channels where inclined planes were cleverly constructed by which to draw up their fast boats, the only clue to their haunts was a surprise shot from some ambush or the expiring embers of a lately deserted bivouac fire, or perhaps a couple of barrels moored in the narrowest part of Fiddler’s Elbow, innocent-looking infernal machines left ready for the unwary. French Creek--_A-ten-ha-ra-kweh-ta-re_, the place where the wall fell down--Abel’s Island and some other points, were his favourites; but Fort Wallace, a small islet at the head of Wells’ Island, was his fastness, where, with a dozen men, he boasted he could withstand two hundred. The number of boats scattered up and down the islands was popularly supposed to be one hundred, and the population of this world of islets some thousand souls, all under the sway of Johnston. Rinaldo, Robert Kidd and Robert le Diable seemed centred in him. He could land at Queenston unarmed and get the guard tipsy, and with a few companions take off seventy stand of arms. But his experience as smuggler and trader, and his exploits when in the employment of the American Government during the war of 1812, when he roamed all the lakes and rivers, intercepting despatches, and when, his boat driven in by a gale on the Canadian shore and his crew captured, he could cross Ontario--at that point thirty-six miles wide--in a bark canoe after a fortnight’s dodging of British vessels, made such affairs as came to his hand in ’37 seem bagatelles. In the early days he had at his command a six-oared barge; now he and his four sons, the latter all partaking of his own nature, powers and daring, did their work in four row-boats of extraordinary speed, each boat with a crew of eight or ten men and all armed to the teeth. The boat used by Johnston himself was twelve-oared, the swiftest of the fleet, twenty-eight feet by four and a half, clinker-built and gay with paint. Black bottom, white above, with a yellow streak six inches wide below the gunwale, inside red, so light in weight that two men could carry her with ease, but capable of accommodating twenty armed men, this gay-looking craft flew his own colours.