“Strengthened by this reinforcement, I ordered that the enemy should be fired on whenever they showed themselves. After sunset a violent northeast wind began to blow, accompanied by snow and hail, which told us we should have a terrible night. The Iroquois were all this time lurking about us, and I judged by their movements that, instead of being deterred by the storm, they would climb into the fort under cover of the darkness. I assembled all my troop (that is to say, six persons), and spoke to them thus: ‘God has saved us to-day from the hands of our foes, but we must take care not to fall into their snares to-night. As for me, I want you to see that I am not afraid. I will take charge of the fort, with the old man [she adds that he was eighty, and had never fired a gun, but he could probably carry an alarm]; and you, Pierre Fontaine, with La Bonté and Gachet, go to the block-house with the women and children, because that is the strongest place; and if I am taken, don’t surrender, even if I am cut to pieces and burned before your eyes. The enemy cannot hurt you in the block-house, if you make the least show of fight.’ “I placed my young brothers on two of the bastions, the old man on the third, and I took the fourth; and all night, in spite of wind, snow, and hail, the cries of ‘All’s well!’ were kept up from the block-house to the fort, and from the fort to the block-house. One would have thought that the place was full of soldiers. The Iroquois believed so, and were completely deceived, as they confessed afterwards to M. de Callières, to whom they told that they had held a council to make a plan for capturing the fort in the night, but had done nothing because such a constant watch was kept. “About one o’clock in the morning the sentinel [the old man] on the bastion by the gate called out, ‘Mademoiselle, I hear something!’ I went to him to find out what it was, and by the help of the snow which covered the ground I could see in the darkness a number of cattle, the miserable remnant that the Iroquois had left us. The others wanted to open the gate and let them in, but I answered: ‘No. You don’t know all the tricks of the savages. They are, no doubt, following the cattle, covered with skins of such animals, so as to get into the fort if we are foolish enough to open the gate for them.’ Nevertheless, after taking every precaution, I decided that we might open it without risk.