His free spirit detected poison in the atmosphere of Quebec, and, for the moment, he longed to be in the great, pure wilderness, pure at least to one of his race.

He opened the window more widely and inhaled the breeze which was coming from the north, out of vast clean forests, that no white man save the trapper had ever entered.
He looked upward, at first toward the blue sky and its clustering stars, and then, turning his eyes to the open space near the inn, caught sight of two shadowy figures.

The Onondaga was alert upon the instant, because he knew those figures, thin though they seemed in the dusk.

One was Tandakora, the Ojibway, and the other was Auguste de Courcelles, Colonel in the French army, a pair most unlike, yet talking together earnestly now.
Tayoga was not at all surprised.

He had pierced the mind of de Courcelles and he had expected him to seek Tandakora.