"I have not been in London a fortnight since my escape," said the man
with the brand. "I was none the less once a good servant of Louis in New
France, for that I found many a new tribe and many a bale of furs that
else had never come to the Mountain for the robbery of the lying
officers who claim the robe of Louis. I was a soldier for the king as
well as a traveler of the forest. Was I not with the Le Moynes and the
band that crossed the icy North and destroyed your robbing English fur
posts on the Bay of Hudson? I fought there and helped blow down your
barriers. I packed my own robe on my back, and walked for the king, till
the _raquette_ thongs cut my ankles to the bone. For what? When I came
back to the settlements at Quebec I was seized for a _coureur de bois_,
a free trader. I was herded like a criminal into a French ship, sent
over seas to a French prison, branded with a French iron, and set like a
brute to pull without reason at a bar of wood in the king's galleys--the
king's hell!"

"And yet you are a Frenchman," sneered Wilson.

"Yet am I not a Frenchman," cried the other. "Nor am I an Englishman. I
am no man of a world of galleys and brands. I am a man of America!"

"'Tis true what he says," spoke Pembroke. "'Tis said the minister of
Louis was feared to keep these men in the galleys, lest their fellows in
New France should become too bitter, and should join the savages in
their inroads on the starving settlements of Quebec and Montréal."

"True," exclaimed Du Mesne. "The _coureurs_ care naught for the law and
little for the king. As for a ruler, we have discovered that a man makes
a most excellent sovereign for himself."