Muck was true to his word. The Screech Owls had managed a tie, a single point, against the powerful Beauport Nordiques, and so they were off to see Montcalm’s skull.

They parked at the Château Frontenac, and before continuing, Muck led the Owls inside and met with an older man who seemed to know him from a long time ago. They talked a while about old hockey games and then moved off to a corner. The man had a notebook and took down some of the things that Muck said. Most of the Owls investigated the hotel souvenir shop while they waited, but Travis couldn’t fight his curiosity. He guessed that whatever it was that Muck and the man were discussing, it involved him. He thought at one point that he saw Muck hand the man a small book with a red vinyl cover. The diary?

Muck said nothing to Travis about the meeting. When Muck had finished, he and Mr. Dillinger paraded the Owls away from the hotel and turned into a series of older, smaller streets until they came to one called Donnacona, which was so narrow it looked more like a side alley than a real street. They came to small sign, “MUSÉE,” and Muck turned in, with the rest of them following.

It was a small chapel. Apart from a few nuns, most of them old and all clad in the same grey habit, the Owls were the only visitors. Attached to the chapel was a small museum filled with period clothes and religious items, most of which meant nothing to the Owls. In a small room on the ground floor, however, there was a glass case on a desk against the far wall, and inside the case was what they had come to see.

Montcalm’s skull.

“Awesome,” said Data.

Travis would have used another word. Repulsive, perhaps, or frightening. There was nothing here that brought to mind the passions of the Battle of Quebec. There was no magnificent blue waistcoat or brilliantly white shirt, nothing heroic in the eyes as the Marquis lay mortally wounded, his men about to carry him off to the chapel where they hoped he might recover in time to save the city. There were not even eyes–only empty sockets.

There was nothing here to suggest anything but death, and the mystery of what becomes of you when the spark of life is gone. The skull seemed so small to Travis–too small, surely, to have ever been a man. He could not see the face of the Marquis in it, only bone yellowed with age, the grinning jaws containing just a few remaining stained and broken teeth.

“Can we take it out of the case?” Data asked.

“Don’t be foolish,” Muck said. “Show a little respect for the dead, if you don’t mind.”

Travis noted that Muck was practically whispering in reply to Data’s near shout. Data saw everything from the point of view of someone who watches too much television. To him, the skull was a prop, just a toy. To Muck, the skull was the past, a real man who had suffered a real and painful death after a real battle.

Travis tried, desperately, to see Montcalm the man in the hollowed-out, yellow eye sockets. What was the last thing he had seen? he wondered. Did he know that Wolfe had won? Did he know that his men were beaten and that he was going to die?

Travis pictured the French general lying there, blood staining his white tunic and beautiful blue waistcoat. If he had felt such pain just hitting the boards, how much pain had Montcalm felt? Was he frightened?

He felt a current of air on his neck. Was it the heat coming out of a ceiling vent? The breath of someone behind him? Or Montcalm’s presence?

He shook it off and turned his attention from the curious skull to the typewritten notes beneath it. There were two: one in French and one in English. He read the English.

It was a strange note. Instead of explaining the Marquis’s life, it attacked the king of France for abandoning Montcalm in death. When the French and English settled their differences and put an end to their war in 1763, the king of France was given the chance to keep any piece of land he chose from the New World. Though the king knew his faithful general had given his life defending this land where Travis now stood, he passed on Quebec and selected, instead, three tiny Caribbean islands.

Whichever of the elderly nuns had typed this curious note, she had ended it with an even more curious line: “He let the Canadians down.”

Travis shivered. He did feel the Marquis’s presence!

Perhaps it wasn’t Travis’s fault, but that was just the way he felt, too–that he had somehow let Canadians down. All Canadians.

If only he’d never agreed to do that damned diary. If only he spoke better French. If only they hadn’t booed…