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They spread out their sensitive military honor over every inch of their new seigniories; and if you chucked the wrong little Indian or habitant's naked baby under the chin, you might unconsciously stir up war in the mind of your host. La Hontan was glad he was directly leaving Acadia. He was fond of Saint-Castin.
"I will not say," remarks the facetious La Hontan, "that the Goddess of Justice is more chaste here than in France, but at any rate, if she is sold, she is sold more cheaply. In Canada we do not pass through the clutches of advocates, the talons of attorneys, and the claws of clerks. These vermin do not as yet infest the land. Every one here pleads his own cause.
Various embellishments have been added to the original narratives by recent writers, such as an imaginary hand-to-hand fight of Iberville and several Englishmen in the blockhouse of Fort Hayes. A host of flat-boats filled with soldiers, and a host of Indian canoes, struggled against the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and slowly made their way to Fort Frontenac. Among the troops was La Hontan.
He gave La Hontan the sign to move before him out of the lodge, and no choice but to obey it, crowding the reluctant and comfortable man into undignified attitudes. La Hontan saw that he had taken offense. There was no accounting for the humors of those disbanded soldiers of the Carignan-Salières, though Saint-Castin was usually a gentle fellow.
La Hontan was there, too, and that pet of La Hontan's, Baron de Saint-Castin's half-breed son, of Pentegoet." The martial note in the officer's voice sunk to contempt. Gaspard was diverted from the governor to recognize, with the speechless perception of an untrained mind, that jealousy which men established in the world have of very young men.
On the other side of the blankets which muffled Gaspard's windows, however, firelight shone with its usual ruddiness, showing the seignior of Beauport prostrate on his old tenant's bed. Juchereau de Saint-Denis was wounded, and La Hontan, who was with the skirmishers, and Gaspard had brought him in the dark down to the farmhouse as the nearest hospital.
Grangula's speech is an example in part of Indian eloquence, and in part of the eloquence of Baron La Hontan, who contributes many striking passages to our knowledge of Frontenac's period. During the period which separates his two terms of office Frontenac's life is almost a blank. His relations with his wife seem to have been amicable, but they did not live together.
Dulhut, Gentilhomme Lionnois, qui a beaucoup de merite et de capacite." La Hontan, i. 103 . "Le Sieur du Lut, homme d'esprit et d'experience." Le Clercq, ii. 137. Charlevoix calls him "one of the bravest officers the King has ever had in this colony." His name is variously spelled Du Luc, Du Lud, Du Lude, Du Lut, Du Luth, Du Lhut.
Coureurs de risques they ought to have been called, as La Hontan remarks. But taken as a whole they were a vigorous, adventurous, strong-limbed set of men. It was a genuine compliment that they paid to the wilderness when they chose to spend year after year in its embrace. In their methods of trading the coureurs-de-bois were unlike anything that the world had ever known before.
Descending the Wisconsin, in four days he reached its mouth, and landed on an island in the river Mississippi. So far, the journey of the Baron La Hontan is plain enough; but beyond this point it is rather apocryphal. He states that he ascended the Mississippi for nine days, when he "entered the mouth of the Long River, which looks like a lake full of bulrushes."
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