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Fear and wonder rendered him powerless. An occurrence like this, in a place assigned to devotion, was adapted to intimidate the stoutest heart. His wandering thoughts were recalled by the groans of one near him. His sight gradually recovered its power, and he was able to discern my father stretched on the floor.
The famed Belle Poule straight ahead did lie; The Arethusa seemed to fly Not a sheet, or a tack, Or a brace, did she slack, Tho' the Frenchmen laugh'd and thought it stuff; But they knew not the handful of men, how tough On board of the Arethusa. On deck five hundred men did dance, The stoutest they could find in France; We with two hundred did advance On board of the Arethusa.
Even the most confident and the stoutest hearts began to think the issue of the contest was becoming doubtful; and that abject class was hourly increasing in numbers, who thought they foresaw all the possessions of the English crown in America subdued by their Christian foes, or laid waste by the inroads of their relentless allies.
We are not acquainted with the inducements held forth; but it is probable that little hesitation ensued, for we find a party prepared to winter at the different places specified, nearly about the same period. Seven of the stoutest and ablest men of the fleet having accordingly agreed to be left behind, their comrades sailed from St. Maurice's Isle on the 26th of August 1633.
As if glad to seek the smallest signs of the forest, the whole of the affrighted herd became steady in its direction, rushing in a straight line toward the little cover of bushes, which has already been so often named. The appearance of danger was now, in reality, of a character to try the stoutest nerves.
Such a situation has appalled the stoutest hearts ere now. Strong men have trembled at feeling themselves thus alone in the wilderness; and well might they, for they knew that the consequence has often been death. The shipwrecked mariner in his open boat is scarcely worse off than the lost traveller upon the prairie-sea; and many, under the circumstances, have gone mad!
This Boisdale was brother of the old Clanranald, chief of the loyal clan Macdonald of Clanranald. If these, his stoutest friends, hesitated to join his expedition Charles should have felt that his cause was desperate indeed. But his mind was made up with all the daring of his five-and-twenty years, and all the ill-fated obstinacy of his race.
He choose twelve of his stoutest men, with himself and Ingiald at their head, to enter the court with drawn swords in their hands. If they were attacked, they were to go out backward fighting, but they were bidden to conduct themselves like men and let nothing alarm them. The others remained outside, keeping the horses in readiness to mount.
Over and over they repeated the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself, marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once thriving self.
Abiram, however, who, since the pacification, either felt, or affected to feel, a more generous interest in his late adversary, saw fit to express an anxiety, to which the others were strangers "It will be well if the boy has escaped the Tetons!" he muttered. "I should be sorry to have Asa, who is one of the stoutest of our party, both in heart and hand, fall into the power of the red devils."
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