"Remember I am sending you to my field as well as to your own," the boy overheard him say. Nearly all his company were gathered in a little mob before his tent. He sat there on a camp stool. They were Canadians from Lorette, anxious for leave of absence, and full of promises. "Yes, monsieur, we will remember your field." "Yes, Captain Vergor, your grain as soon as we have gathered ours in." "It shall be done, captain." Jacques had heard of Vergor. A few years before, Vergor had been put under arrest for giving up Fort Beauséjour, in Acadia, to the English without firing a shot. The boy thought it strange that such a man should be put in charge of any part of the defensive cordon around Quebec. But Vergor had a friend in the intendant Bigot, who knew how to reinstate his disgraced favorites. The arriving cart drew the captain's attention from his departing men. He smiled, his depressed nose and fleshy lips being entirely good-natured. "A load of provisions, and a recruit for my company," he said. "Monsieur the captain needs recruits," observed Jacques. "Society is what I need most," said Vergor. "And from appearances I am going to have it at my supper which the cook is about to set before me." "I think I will stay all night here," said Jacques. "You overwhelm me," responded Vergor. "There are so many empty tents." "Fill as many of them as you can," suggested Vergor. "You are doubtless much away from your mother, inspecting the troops; but what will madame say if you fail to answer at her roll call to-night?" "Nothing. I should be in my father's tent at Montreal, if she had been able to go when he was ordered back there." "Who is your father?" "Le Gardeur de Repentigny." Vergor drew his lips together for a soft whistle, as he rose to direct the storing of his goods. "It is a young general with whom I am to have the honor of messing. I thought he had the air of camps and courts the moment I saw his head over the side of the cart." Many a boy secretly despises the man to whose merry insolence he submits. But the young Repentigny felt for Vergor such contempt as only an incompetent officer inspires. No sentinels were stationed. The few soldiers remaining busied themselves over their mess fires. Jacques looked down a cove not quite as steep as the rest of the cliff, yet as nearly perpendicular as any surface on which trees and bushes can take hold. It was clothed with a thick growth of sere weeds, cut by one hint of a diagonal line. Perhaps laborers at a fulling mill now rotting below had once climbed this rock. Rain had carried the earth from above in small cataracts down its face, making a thin alluvial coating. A strip of land separated the rock from the St. Lawrence, which looked wide and gray in the evening light. Showers raked the far-off opposite hills. Leaves showing scarlet or orange were dulled by flying mist. The boy noticed more boats drifting up river on the tide than he had counted in Quebec Basin.