own, the
latter had seen fit to change it. This was reasoning enough for soldiers, though
the hurt received by Serjeant Dunham would have sufficiently explained the
circumstance, had any explanation been required.
    All this time Capt. Sanglier was looking after his own breakfast, with the
resignation of a philosopher, the coolness of a veteran, the ingenuity and
science of a Frenchman and the voracity of an ostrich. This person had now been
in the colony some thirty years, having left France in some such situation in
his own army, as Muir filled in the 55th. An iron constitution, perfect obduracy
of feeling, a certain address well suited to manage savages, and an indomitable
courage, had early pointed him out to the Commander in chief, as a suitable
agent to be employed in directing the military operations of his Indian allies.
In this capacity, then, he had risen to the titular rank of captain, and, with
his promotion, had acquired a portion of the habits and opinions of his
associates, with a facility and an adaptation of self that are thought, in this
part of the world, to be peculiar to his countrymen. He had often led parties of
the Iroquois in their predatory expeditions, and his conduct on such occasions,
exhibited the contradictory results of both alleviating the misery produced by
this species of warfare, and of augmenting it, by the broader views and greater
resources of civilization. In other words, he planned enterprises that, in their
importance and consequences much exceeded the usual policy of the Indians, and
then stepped in to lessen some of the evils of his own creating. In short, he
was an adventurer whom circumstances had thrown into a situation, where the
callous qualities of men of his class, might readily show themselves, for good
or for evil, and he was not of a character to baffle fortune, by any ill timed
squeamishness on the score of early impressions, or to trifle with her
liberality, by unnecessarily provoking her frowns through wanton cruelty. Still,
as his name was unavoidably connected with many of the excesses committed by his
parties, he was generally considered in the American Provinces, a wretch who
delighted in bloodshed, and who found his greatest happiness in tormenting the
helpless and the innocent, and the name of Sanglier, which was a soubriquet of
his own adopting, or of Flint Heart, as he was usually termed on the borders,
had got to be as terrible to the women and children of that part of the country,
as those of Butler and Brandt became at a later day.
    The meeting between Pathfinder and Sanglier bore some