that embrace discover her secret, wriggled out of it amid the laughter of the others, and fled.
She was not the only one to go aboard. Into the squadron piled the Canadians and a few redskin allies, mostly on Iberville's ship. Without losing a moment, despite scurvy-smitten crews, the impetuous le Moynes were off.
To Bess Adams, it was like a wild fantastic dream, as the shores of Newfoundland faded away and the four ships hauled northward along the Labrador coast. One might say that she was utterly mad, struck silly by an insensate infatuation for an older man; perhaps! Yet cold stark sanity has condemned many a person to a lifetime of hell. To pitch sanity overboard and follow a dream takes courage and a great heart.
Although the quarters aboard the Pelican were crowded, her secret remained entirely safe. There was no pampered relaxation about this life; all was bitter cold, bitter wet; half the crew down with scurvy. Men went unshaved. They slept in their clothes.
Besides, the poor drab wench with her tightly bound breasts and coarse garments was by no means abloom with beauty. Only those great dark eyes of her might have hinted the truth, had there been anyone to suspect; but there was none. The glowering Indians, who might have sensed her secret, were too seasick to care.
With the red-headed Fitzmaurice of Kerry, she made fast friends; an Irish exile, this fighting chaplain was a gay soul, who divined her intense admiration for Iberville and shared it fully. So did the merry Bacqueville, the Royal Commissioner. He was a Creole from the West Indies, and worshipped Iberville; he had a vast project, in fact, of writing a book about Canada, and hung day and night upon one or other of the Canadians, getting stories of Indian raids and Hudson's Bay.
This Bacqueville had a vast curiosity about everything, scratched away with quill and ink-horn at every opportunity, and was an arrant nuisance; but so debonair and merry was he that everyone gladly contributed to his lore. Bess Adams, who knew how to trim a quill, gave him much help and taught him a little English, and liked him in her shy, distant way.
Not that she had much time to spare; from the start, she worked as never before in her life, and liked it. Of Iberville she saw a good deal, always getting a smiling word and a gay jest to warm her cold spirits; he spared her the smiles he gave to few others. For his one burning thought now was to drive ahead at any and every cost. The first to get through the straits and reach the bay would win the prize of empire.
They passed Labrador and came at last into the straits between the enormous iron cliffs, heading on among the ice-drifts. Here, for Bess Adams and all others aboard, life became a very hell of hopeless effort, with Iberville lashing them to frantic exertion by day and night. They chopped at the ice, they blasted it with powder, they somehow smashed a way through it and ahead—only to be carried back, time and again, by the heavy drift.
Days passed into weeks. They lingered, sometimes within sight of the bay itself, more often carried back for miles with the pack. Fog hung over everything and toil was incessant. The other ships were completely lost to
