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.