big sails came flopping down, Captain Outlaw had come to anchor on the _Success_; and the tale that he told--one can see the anger mount to old Sargeant's eyes and the fear to Jean Péré's--was that the _Merchant Perpetuana_, off Digges Island, had been boarded and scuttled in the midnight gloom of July 27 by two French ships. Hume and Smithsend had been overpowered, fettered, and carried off prisoners to Quebec. Mike Grimmington too, who seems to have been on Hume's ship, was a prisoner. Fourteen of the crew had been bayoneted to death and thrown overboard. Outlaw did not know the later details of the raid--how Hume was to be sent home to France for ransom, and Mike Grimmington was to be tortured to betray the secret signals of the Bay, and Smithsend and the other English seamen to be sold into slavery in Martinique. Ultimately, all three were ransomed or escaped back to England; but they heard strange threats of raid and overland foray as they lay imprisoned beneath the Château St Louis in Quebec. Fortunately Radisson and the five Frenchmen, being on board the _Happy Return_, had succeeded in escaping from the ice jam and were safe in Nelson. What Jean Péré remarked on hearing this recital is not known--possibly something not very complimentary about the plans of the French raiders going awry; but the next thing is that Mr Jan Parry--as Sargeant persists in describing him--finds himself in 'the butter vat' or prison of Albany with fetters on his feet and handcuffs on his wrists. On October 29 he is sent prisoner to England on the home-bound ships of Bond and Lucas. His two companion spies are marooned for the winter on Charlton Island. As well try, however, to maroon a bird on the wing as a French wood-runner. The men fished and snared game so diligently that by September they had full store of provisions for escape. Then they made themselves a raft or canoe and crossed to the mainland. By Christmas they had reached the French camps of Michilimackinac. In another month they were in Quebec with wild tales of Péré, held prisoner in the dungeons of Albany. France and England were at peace; but the Chevalier de Troyes, a French army officer, and the brothers Le Moyne, dare-devil young adventurers of New France, asked permission of the governor of Quebec to lead a band of wood-runners overland to rescue Péré on the Bay, fire the English forts, and massacre the English. Rumours of these raids Smithsend heard in his dungeon below Château St Louis; and he contrived to send a secret letter to England, warning the Company.