“Ay, we’ll have news of them, never fear!” Iberville rose. “Rest assured, you shall have your ship again and the best charts we can give you. M. l’Abbé, I offered this roving rascal a commission if he would sail with me--and he refused. Yet behold, here he is! Is this the hand of providence or not?” “I’d call it Hal Crawford’s luck!” said Fitzmaurice, with a chuckle. “But where to, Pierre? Sit down, man, and smoke a pipe----” “I must lay out the course and watch the charts,” said Iberville. “These pilots are afraid of the ice and shallows. Have out your talk in peace.” He departed. Bienville, leaning across the table with his eyes ashine, listened eagerly while Crawford and the chaplain conned the days that had elapsed since Limerick and Boynewater. Once Crawford turned to him gaily. “And suppose we find the English fleet ahead of us, Bienville?” The boy shrugged. “Ask Pierre! We’ve put some of our guns and thirty seamen aboard the _Profound_, and twoscore of our men are down below with scurvy. But we’ll not find the enemy ahead of us. Pierre is always the first, never fear!” So the _Pelican_ drove on to her destiny, while men laughed and made merry aboard her at thought of the green land so near, nor dreamed to what doom they rushed so merrily. And, while she drove on, strange things were taking place behind her at the mouth of the straits, where the curtains of fog still lingered and blew away and returned again. Strange things, indeed, and stranger sounds echoing back from these ironbound cliffs than any they had yet heard since man came to these seas. For there the flash of cannon split the fog, and the crashing thunder of broadsides boomed back from the headlands. When the thick mist lifted for a space that morning, the _Profound_ was fast nipped in the ice, with three unsuspected English frigates about her stern; whereupon, as the terse chronicler puts it, “Du Guai attacked.” Hour after hour he fought the three with his two little stern-guns, hour after hour they poured their shot into him, until the fog closed down again and they deemed him sunk, and the roaring cliffs fell silent. There, too, before this fight happened, Moses Deakin had fallen upon fate and found it bitter to the taste. Before the dawn came, he sighted the flare of a ship in the ice, and drove his men at her. He thought her Crawford’s bark, but she was something else--the _Hudson’s Bay_, crowded with extra seamen and servants of the English company, and in command of her was grim old Nick Smithsend, who hanged fur-pirates and Frenchmen alike. The end of this matter was that Moses Deakin and half his Boston men sat in irons to await hanging at Nelson, and the other half of them lay dead upon the ice.