In England the adventurers had lodged 'Parry' in jail on a charge of having 'damnified the Company.' Smithsend's letter of warning had come; but how could the Company reach their forts before the ice cleared? Meanwhile they hired twenty extra men for each fort. They presented Radisson with a hogshead of claret. At the same time they had him and his wife, 'dwelling at the end of Seething Lane on Tower Hill,' sign a bond for £2000 by way of ensuring fidelity. 'Ye two journals of Mr Radisson's last expedition to ye Bay' were delivered into the hands of the Company, where they have rested to this day. The ransom demanded for Hume was paid by the Company at secret sessions of the Governing Committee, and the captain came post-haste from France with word of La Martinière's raid. My Lord Churchill being England's champion against 'those varmint' the French, 'My Lord Churchill was presented with a catt skin counter pane for his bedd' and was asked to bespeak the favour of the king that France should make restitution. My Lord Churchill brought back word that the king said: 'Gentlemen, I understand your business! On my honour, I assure you I will take particular care on it to see that you are righted.' In all, eighty-nine men were on the Bay at this time. It proved not easy to charter ships that year. Sir Stephen Evance advanced his price on the _Happy Return_ from £400 to £750. Knight, of whom we shall hear anon, and Red Cap Sandford, of whom the minutes do not tell enough to inform us whether the name refers to his hair or his hat, urged the Governing Committee to send at least eighteen more men to Albany, twelve more to Moose, six more to Rupert, and to open a trading post at Severn between Nelson and Albany. They advised against attempting to go up the rivers while French interlopers were active. Radisson bought nine hundred muskets for Nelson, and ordered two great guns to be mounted on the walls. When Smithsend arrived from imprisonment in Quebec, war fever against the French rose to white-heat. But, while all this preparation was in course at home, sixty-six swarthy Indians and thirty-three French wood-runners, led by the Chevalier de Troyes, the Le Moyne brothers, and La Chesnaye, the fur trader, were threading the deeply-forested, wild hinterland between Quebec and Hudson Bay. On June 18, 1686, Moose Fort had shut all its gates; but the sleepy sentry, lying in his blanket across the entrance, had not troubled to load the cannon. He slept heavily outside the high palisade made of pickets eighteen feet long, secure in the thought that twelve soldiers lay in one of the corner bastions and that three thousand pounds of powder were stored in another. With all lights out and seemingly in absolute security, the chief factor's store and house, built of whitewashed stone, stood in the centre of the inner courtyard.