One evening in the winter of 1694-95 a dozen young men were lounging around the fire in the big room of the storehouse at St. Maxime, a small settlement on the St. Lawrence River. The door opened and two others entered, brushing the snow from their leggings and moccasins. “What luck with your traps?” cried one of the loungers. “An otter and eight beaver,” answered Noël Duroc, as he tossed a pack of pelts into the corner. He was a tall, straight young Frenchman, whose gay and careless nature looked out frankly through a pair of laughing black eyes. “But come, Madame Bouvier,” he cried to the store-keeper’s wife, “give us something to eat; hot, and plenty of it--eh, Philippe! If you want news, there’s more than news of traps--it’s of the Iroquois. ’Tis said they’re ready for a raid to the north--to make glad the hearts of their good friends the Algonquins and the French. So our old bear of a seigneur may do some hugging. But to-night he has other things to think of. Marc is home--came up along the river from Quebec to-day.” “Is he as much of a monk as ’twas said he would be?” asked Jean Bourdo. “You know the old seigneur swears he will have no monk’s scholar around him--though he were twice his nephew.” “We have just seen Marc, and, trust me, he is the same jolly lad he was two years ago. You can make no grave-faced monk of him! But the old seigneur thinks him surely spoiled. ’Twere better Marc had not seen the monastery--not that I lack as a churchman; what would we do at St. Maxime were it not for our good Father Auguste, who taught us when we were boys, and keeps us straight now that we are men?--for if he had stayed here he would doubtless be our captain--a post worth having, now that the Iroquois are like to visit us.” “Who will be our captain?” asked Jean Bourdo. “The seigneur has sent to Quebec for an officer--one that’s lately from France, and that’s been well trained in the King’s army. The old man knows how much we sympathize with Marc, and so, being surly as a bear, he will have none of us.” “It may be a costly mistake, this putting of an Old-World soldier over us,” said Jean. “’Tis true we have small knowledge of the science of war as taught in old France; but we can fight in the woods, and know how to beat the Iroquois at their own game, and I’ll warrant that’s more than this fine soldier can do! ’Tis a pity that Marc--a lad brought up in the woods, whom we all like and would gladly follow--should be kept back just because madame his mother sent him to school to the monks. But the old seigneur will have his way, even when ’tis to his harm!” “So he will; and if Marc is to lead us, the seigneur must be made to think that it is his own doing. Come, Philippe,” continued Noël, turning to the man who had come in with him, “you are older than the rest, and have a wiser head; think of some way of bending the seigneur to our purpose.”