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Updated: July 7, 2025
Jean Bevoir had not forgotten the Morrises, nor what they had done to drag him down, as he expressed it, and, although the war was at an end, he was determined to make Dave, Henry, and the others pay dearly for the ruin they had brought to his plans in the past. "I shall show them that, though France is beaten, Jean Bevoir still lives," he told himself boastingly.
For the rest of the day Flat Nose waited impatiently for the coming of Bevoir and Jacques Valette. When at last he saw them approaching he ran to meet them. As best he could he related what he had seen and heard at the Indian village. Jacques Valette listened in moody silence, but ere Flat Nose had finished a crafty look came into Jean Bevoir's face.
"Baptiste Masson!" he muttered, naming a rough French hunter and trapper who, in years gone by, had worked for Jean Bevoir. "As I thought. It was a plot between the Wanderers and the French! They mean to drive me from the Ohio if they possibly can. Masson, eh? Can it be that Jean Bevoir, and Valette, and Bergerac were in it, too? More than likely."
He did not believe in Bevoir, yet what the man said might possibly be true. He did not wish to be tortured by the Indians. "I'd rather run my chances with Bevoir," he told himself. "I'll have the knife, and perhaps I can pick up a gun or a pistol. He may be sick of hiding himself, and he knows father will treat him kindly if he really does save me."
Valette turned away to do as bidden. As he did so there came a shout from a distance, followed by a peculiar Indian-cry, telling all in the village that the white captive had escaped. "We must be quick!" said Bevoir, in French. "There is not a moment to spare." Jacques Valette brought up the horses with all possible speed.
They found no cause for alarm, but a few days later two trappers came in with news that nearly all of the Bevoir party had been killed, Bevoir himself escaping after being wounded both in the arm and the side. "The Wyandots and the Ottawas are very angry at the Wanderers," said the hunter who furnished the news. "They say the Wanderers must hereafter keep to the hunting grounds in the far west.
He seems to take savage delight in crowding on my heels." "That Valette is about as bad a rascal as Bevoir." "That is true." "Do you know much of the third fellow?" "Not a great deal, but I always fancied he was a Frenchman of the better sort. He used to be attached to the fort at Presqu' Isle. I once bought some furs from him, and he was much pleased over what I gave him for them.
He wished to recover the stolen goods and also the fifty pounds which had been taken from Sam Barringford by Jean Bevoir at the time the old frontiersman was a prisoner at the Wanderers' village. An expedition was organized, consisting of the trader and seven whites and Indians, and they remained out the best part of a week, hunting for the Wanderers and for Bevoir and his companions.
The Morrises firmly believed that Jean Bevoir was dead, but such was not a fact. A wound thought to be fatal had taken a turn for the better, and the fellow was now lying in a French farmhouse on the St. Lawrence, where two or three of his old companions in crime were doing their best to nurse him back to health and strength.
Somebody ought to be able to place them, although, to be sure, a great number of children have become hopelessly lost during the late war." "We know that," answered Mrs. Morris with a shudder. "Wasn't little Nell stolen from us by the Indians and then held by that bad French trader, Jean Bevoir?" "Didn't you say Bevoir was dead?" asked Paul Thompson.
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