The young French officers fought with a jest on their lips, but always with skill and courage, as none knew better than the British colonials themselves.

There was a glow and glamor about Quebec which the sober English capitals farther south did not have.

It might be the glow and glamor of decay, but people did not know it then, although they did know that the Frenchman, with his love of the forest and skill in handling the Indians, was a formidable foe.
"When do you think we'll reach the St.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.