Soon he returned with eight or ten men, all that could be spared, and two pieces of cannon charged with canister shot. Between the scene of battle and the fort there was a screen of trees under cover of which the reinforcement made its way and thus escaped the attention of the savages till it suddenly appeared in view on this side of the screen and commenced firing on the Iroquois. Major Closse's party now went into the open to join fire also and a brisk and hot interchange took place. But the enemy were being overmastered and made their best to retreat, carrying with them their dead as far as possible, according to their custom. Dollier de Casson does not give the number of the enemy slain. "Usually," he says, "they decimated their losses, but, speaking of this occasion, they owned that 'we all died there.'" M. de Belmont in his history states that more than fifty of the Iroquois were wounded and twenty killed. On the French side the only one killed was La Lochetière, and one wounded, Laviolette. This was only one of the brave actions which surrounded the fame of the warlike Lambert Closse as revealed in the early chronicles. [Illustration: LAMBERT CLOSSE (By Philippe Hébert)] Thus the fort of Montreal was the scene of many such conflicts, unassisted by the "camp volant," which de Lauson had suppressed in 1652. Père Mercier, in his "Relations of the Year 1653," writes: "There has passed no month of the year in which the Iroquois have not stealthily visited Ville Marie, attempting to surprise it. But they have had no great success. The settlers have assisted one another with so much determination and courage that as soon as a gunshot is heard in any direction, they run thither quickly, without any dread of the dangers besetting them." At Quebec, it was announced that Montreal had been blotted out. In the spring of 1653 the governor of Quebec, anxious for news of this advanced post, had sent a barque thither, giving the commander instructions that he should not approach the fort, unless he had proof certain that the French were there, adding that if he did not see any, he was to come back to Quebec, for fear that the Iroquois, having captured Ville Marie, might be lying in ambush to capture them also. The barque advanced near the fort in a dense fog, and anchored. But seeing no one and hearing no signal, they obeyed their instructions literally enough, and went back to Quebec with the dire tale of the destruction of the French colonists. The wiseacres no doubt said that the inevitable had occurred at last. Meanwhile in the fort, the keen-eyed had seen the vague outline of a vessel, but others said it was a phantom of the imagination, and when later the mist rolled away and they saw no ship, these were satisfied with their diagnosis until news came later from Quebec that it was a veritable vessel after all.