Lawrence, Dave?" he asked.
"In two or three days if we're not attacked again," replied the hunter,
"and then we'll get a bigger boat and row down the river to Quebec."
"Will they let us pass?"
"Why shouldn't they? There's no war, at least not yet."
"That battle back there in the gorge may not have been war, but it
looked precisely like it."
The hunter laughed deep in his throat, and it was a satisfied laugh.
"It did look like it," he said, "and it was war, red war, but nobody was
responsible for it. The Marquis Duquesne, the Governor General of
Canada, who is Onontio to our Iroquois, will raise his jeweled hand, and
protest that he knew nothing about those Indians, that they were wild
warriors from the west, that none of his good, pious Indians of Canada
could possibly have been among them. And the Intendant, Francois Bigot,
the most corrupt and ambitious man in North America, will say that they
obtained no rifles, no muskets, no powder, no lead from him or his
agents. Oh, no, these fine French gentlemen will disown the attack upon
us, as they would have disavowed it, just the same, if we had been
killed.
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