LORDS

OF THE

NORTH

BY

A. C. LAUT

TORONTO
WILLIAM BRIGGS

Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand nine hundred, by William Briggs, at the Department of Agriculture.

TO THE
Pioneers and their Descendants
WHOSE
HEROISM WON THE LAND,
THIS WORK
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT.

The author desires to express thanks to pioneers and fur traders of the West for information, details and anecdotes bearing on the old life, which are herein embodied; and would also acknowledge the assistance of the history of the North-West Company and manuscripts of the Bourgeois, compiled by Senator L. R. Masson; and the value of such early works as those of Dr. George Bryce, Gunn, Hargraves, Ross and others.

THE TRAPPER'S DEFIANCE.

"The adventurous spirits, who haunted the forest and plain, grew fond of their wild life and affected a great contempt for civilization."

You boxed-up, mewed-up artificials,
Pent in your piles of mortar and stone,
Hugging your finely spun judicials,
Adorning externals, externals alone,
Vaunting in prideful ostentation
Of the Juggernaut car, called Civilization—
What know ye of freedom and life and God?

Monkeys, that follow a showman's string,
Know more of freedom and less of care,
Cage birds, that flutter from perch to ring,
Have less of worry and surer fare.
Cursing the burdens, yourselves have bound,
In a maze of wants, running round and round—
Are ye free men, or manniken slaves?

Costly patches, adorning your walls,
Are all of earth's beauty ye care to know;
But ye strut about in soul-stifled halls
To play moth-life by a candle-glow—
What soul has space for upward fling,
What manhood room for shoulder-swing,
Coffined and cramped from the vasts of God?

The Spirit of Life, O atrophied soul,
In trappings of ease is not confined;
That touch from Infinite Will 'neath the Whole
In Nature's temple, not man's, is shrined!
From hovel-shed come out and be strong!
Be ye free! Be redeemed from the wrong,
Of soul-guilt, I charge you as sons of God!

INTRODUCTION.

I, Rufus Gillespie, trader and clerk for the North-West Company, which ruled over an empire broader than Europe in the beginning of this century, and with Indian allies and its own riotous Bois-Brulés, carried war into the very heart of the vast territory claimed by its rivals, the Honorable Hudson's Bay Company, have briefly related a few stirring events of those boisterous days. Should the account here set down be questioned, I appeal for confirmation to that missionary among northern tribes, the famous priest, who is the son of the ill-fated girl stolen by the wandering Iroquois. Lord Selkirk's narration of lawless conflict with the Nor'-Westers and the verbal testimony of Red River settlers, who are still living, will also substantiate what I have stated; though allowance must be made for the violent partisan leaning of witnesses, and from that, I—as a Nor'-Wester—do not claim to be free.

On the charges and counter-charges of cruelty bandied between white men and red, I have nothing to say. Remembering how white soldiers from eastern cities took the skin of a native chief for a trophy of victory, and recalling the fiendish glee of Mandanes over a victim, I can only conclude that neither race may blamelessly point the finger of reproach at the other.

Any variations in detail from actual occurrences as seen by my own eyes are solely for the purpose of screening living descendants of those whose lives are here portrayed from prying curiosity; but, in truth, many experiences during the thrilling days of the fur companies were far too harrowing for recital. I would fain have tempered some of the incidents herein related to suit the sentiments of a milk-and-water age; but that could be done only at the cost of truth.

There is no French strain in my blood, so I have not that passionate devotion to the wild daring of l'ancien régime, in which many of my rugged companions under Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest gloried; but he would be very sluggish, indeed, who could not look back with some degree of enthusiasm to the days of gentlemen adventurers in no-man's-land, in a word, to the workings of the great fur trading companies. Theirs were the trappers and runners, the Coureurs des Bois and Bois-Brulés, who traversed the immense solitudes of the pathless west; theirs, the brigades of gay voyageurs chanting hilarious refrains in unison with the rhythmic sweep of paddle blades and following unknown streams until they had explored from St. Lawrence to MacKenzie River; and theirs, the merry lads of the north, blazing a track through the wilderness and leaving from Atlantic to Pacific lonely stockaded fur posts—footprints for the pioneers' guidance. The whitewashed palisades of many little settlements on the rivers and lakes of the far north are poor relics of the fur companies' ancient grandeur. That broad domain stretching from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean, reclaimed from savagery for civilization, is the best monument to the unheralded forerunners of empire.

RUFUS GILLESPIE.
Winnipeg—one time Fort Garry
Formerly Red River Settlement,
19th June, 18—

Transcriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected.

CONTENTS

LORDS OF THE NORTH

CHAPTER I

WHEREIN A LAD SEES MAKERS OF HISTORY

"Has any one seen Eric Hamilton?" I asked.

For an hour, or more, I had been lounging about the sitting-room of a club in Quebec City, waiting for my friend, who had promised to join me at dinner that night. I threw aside a news-sheet, which I had exhausted down to minutest advertisements, stretched myself and strolled across to a group of old fur-traders, retired partners of the North-West Company, who were engaged in heated discussion with some officers from the Citadel.

"Has any one seen Eric Hamilton?" I repeated, indifferent to the merits of their dispute.

"That's the tenth time you've asked that question," said my Uncle Jack MacKenzie, looking up sharply, "the tenth time, Sir, by actual count," and he puckered his brows at the interruption, just as he used to when I was a little lad on his knee and chanced to break into one of his hunting stories with a question at the wrong place.

"Hang it," drawled Colonel Adderly, a squatty man with an over-fed look on his bulging, red cheeks, "hang it, you don't expect Hamilton? The baby must be teething," and he added more chaff at the expense of my friend, who had been the subject of good-natured banter among club members for devotion to his first-born.

I saw Adderly's object was more to get away from the traders' arguments than to answer me; and I returned the insolent challenge of his unconcealed yawn in the faces of the elder men by drawing a chair up to the company of McTavishes and Frobishers and McGillivrays and MacKenzies and other retired veterans of the north country.

"I beg your pardon, gentlemen," said I, "what were you saying to Colonel Adderly?"

"Talk of your military conquests, Sir," my uncle continued, "Why, Sir, our men have transformed a wilderness into an empire. They have blazed a path from Labrador on the Atlantic to that rock on the Pacific, where my esteemed kinsman, Sir Alexander MacKenzie, left his inscription of discovery. Mark my words, Sir, the day will come when the names of David Thompson and Simon Fraser and Sir Alexander MacKenzie will rank higher in English annals than Braddock's and——"

"Egad!" laughed the officer, amused at my uncle, who had been a leading spirit in the North-West Company and whose enthusiasm knew no bounds, "Egad! You gentlemen adventurers wouldn't need to have accomplished much to eclipse Braddock." And he paused with a questioning supercilious smile. "Sir Alexander was a first cousin of yours, was he not?"

My uncle flushed hotly. That slighting reference to gentlemen adventurers, with just a perceptible emphasis of the adventurers, was not to his taste.

"Pardon me, Sir," said he stiffly, "you forget that by the terms of their charter, the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company have the privilege of being known as gentlemen adventurers. And by the Lord, Sir, 'tis a gentleman adventurer and nothing else, that stock-jobbing scoundrel of a Selkirk has proved himself! And he, sir, was neither Nor'-Wester, nor Canadian, but an Englishman, like the commander of the Citadel." My uncle puffed out these last words in the nature of a defiance to the English officer, whose cheeks took on a deeper purplish shade; but he returned the charge good-humoredly enough.

"Nonsense, MacKenzie, my good friend," laughed he patronizingly, "if the Right Honorable, the Earl of Selkirk, were such an adventurer, why the deuce did the Beaver Club down at Montreal receive him with open mouths and open arms and——"

"And open hearts, Sir, you may say," interrupted my Uncle MacKenzie. "And I'd thank you not to 'good-friend' me," he added tartly.

Now, the Beaver Club was an organization at Nor'-Westers renowned for its hospitality. Founded in 1785, originally composed of but nineteen members and afterwards extended only to men who had served in the Pays d'En Haut, it soon acquired a reputation for entertaining in regal style. Why the vertebrae of colonial gentlemen should sometimes lose the independent, upright rigidity of self-respect on contact with old world nobility, I know not. But instantly, Colonel Adderly's reference to Lord Selkirk and the Beaver Club called up the picture of a banquet in Montreal, when I was a lad of seven, or thereabouts. I had been tricked out in some Highland costume especially pleasing to the Earl—cap, kilts, dirk and all—and was taken by my Uncle Jack MacKenzie to the Beaver Club. Here, in a room, that glittered with lights, was a table steaming with things, which caught and held my boyish eyes; and all about were crowds of guests, gentlemen, who had been invited in the quaint language of the club, "To discuss the merits of bear, beaver and venison." The great Sir Alexander MacKenzie, with his title fresh from the king, and his feat of exploring the river now known by his name and pushing through the mountain fastnesses to the Pacific on all men's lips—was to my Uncle Jack's right. Simon Fraser and David Thompson and other famous explorers, who were heroes to my imagination, were there too. In these men and what they said of their wonderful voyages I was far more interested than in the young, keen-faced man with a tie, that came up in ruffles to his ears, and with an imperial decoration on his breast, which told me he was Lord Selkirk.

I remember when the huge salvers and platters were cleared away, I was placed on the table to execute the sword dance. I must have acquitted myself with some credit; for the gentlemen set up a prodigious clapping, though I recall nothing but a snapping of my fingers, a wave of my cap and a whirl of lights and faces around my dizzy head. Then my uncle took me between his knees, promising to let me sit up to the end if I were good, and more wine was passed.

"That's enough for you, you young cub," says my kinsman, promptly inverting the wine-glass before me.

"O Uncle MacKenzie," said I with a wry face, "do you measure your own wine so?"

Whereat, the noble Earl shouted, "Bravo! here's for you, Mr. MacKenzie."

And all the gentlemen set up a laugh and my uncle smiled and called to the butler, "Here, Johnson, toddy for one, glass of hot water, pure, for other."

But when Johnson brought back the glasses, I observed Uncle MacKenzie kept the toddy. "There, my boy, there's Adam's ale for you," said he, and into the glass of hot water he popped a peppermint lozenge.

"Fie!" laughed Sir Alexander to my uncle's right, "Fie to cheat the little man!"

"His is the best wine of the cellar," vowed His Lordship; and I drank my peppermint with as much gusto and self-importance as any man of them.

Then followed toasts, such a list of toasts as only men inured to tests of strength could take. Ironical toasts to the North-West Passage, whose myth Sir Alexander had dispelled; toasts to the discoverer of the MacKenzie River, which brought storms of applause that shook the house; toasts to "our distinguished guest," whose suave response disarmed all suspicion; toasts to the "Northern winterers," poor devils, who were serving the cause by undergoing a life-long term of Arctic exile; toasts to "the merry lads of the north," who only served in the ranks without attaining to the honor of partnership; toasts enough, in all conscience, to drown the memory of every man present. Thanks to my Uncle Jack MacKenzie, all my toasts were taken in peppermint, and the picture in my mind of that banquet is as clear to-day as it was when I sat at the table. What would I not give to be back at the Beaver Club, living it all over again and hearing Sir Alexander MacKenzie with his flashing hero-eyes and quick, passionate gestures, recounting that wonderful voyage of his with a sulky crew into a region of hostiles; telling of those long interminable winters of Arctic night, when the great explorer sounded the depths of utter despair in service for the company and knew not whether he faced madness or starvation; and thrilling the whole assembly with a description of his first glimpse of the Pacific! Perhaps it was what I heard that night—who can tell—that drew me to the wild life of after years. But I was too young, then, to recognize fully the greatness of those men. Indeed, my country was then and is yet too young; for if their greatness be recognized, it is forgotten and unhonored.

I think I must have fallen asleep on my uncle's knee; for I next remember sleepily looking about and noticing that many of the gentlemen had slid down in their chairs and with closed eyes were breathing heavily. Others had slipped to the floor and were sound asleep. This shocked me and I was at once wide awake. My uncle was sitting very erect and his arm around my waist had the tight grasp that usually preceded some sharp rebuke. I looked up and found his face grown suddenly so hard and stern, I was all affright lest my sleeping had offended him. His eyes were fastened on Lord Selkirk with a piercing, angry gaze. His Lordship was not nodding, not a bit of it. How brilliant he seemed to my childish fancy! He was leaning forward, questioning those Nor'-Westers, who had received him with open arms, and open hearts. And the wine had mounted to the head of the good Nor'-Westers and they were now also receiving the strange nobleman with open mouths, pouring out to him a full account of their profits, the extent of the vast, unknown game preserve, and how their methods so far surpassed those of the Hudson's Bay, their rival's stock had fallen in value from 250 to 50 per cent.

The more information they gave, the more His Lordship plied them with questions.

"I must say," whispered Uncle Jack to Sir Alexander MacKenzie, "if any Hudson's Bay man asked such pointed questions on North-West business, I'd give myself the pleasure of ejecting him from this room."

Then, I knew his anger was against Lord Selkirk and not against me for sleeping.

"Nonsense," retorted Sir Alexander, who had cut active connection with the Nor'-Westers some years before, "there's no ground for suspicion." But he seemed uneasy at the turn things had taken.

"Has your Lordship some colonization scheme that you ask such pointed questions?" demanded my uncle, addressing the Earl. The nobleman turned quickly to him and said something about the Highlanders and Prince Edward's Island, which I did not understand. The rest of that evening fades from my thoughts; for I was carried home in Mr. Jack MacKenzie's arms.

And all these things happened some ten or twelve years before that wordy sword-play between this same uncle of mine and the English colonel from the Citadel.

"We erred, Sir, through too great hospitality," my uncle was saying to the colonel. "How could we know that Selkirk would purchase controlling interest in Hudson's Bay stock? How could we know he'd secure a land grant in the very heart of our domain?"

"I don't object to his land, nor to his colonists, nor to his dower of ponies and muskets and bayonets to every mother's son of them," broke in another of the retired traders, "but I do object to his drilling those same colonists, to his importing a field battery and bringing out that little ram of a McDonell from the Army to egg the settlers on! It's bad enough to pillage our fort; but this proclamation to expel Nor'-Westers from what is claimed as Hudson's Bay Territory——"

"Just listen to this," cries my uncle pulling out a copy of the obnoxious proclamation and reading aloud an order for the expulsion of all rivals to the Hudson's Bay Company from the northern territory.

"Where can Hamilton be?" said I, losing interest in the traders' quarrel as soon as they went into details.

"Home with his wifie," half sneered the officer in a nagging way, that irritated me, though the remark was, doubtless, true. "Home with his wifie," he repeated in a sing-song, paying no attention to the elucidation of a subject he had raised. "Good old man, Hamilton, but since marriage, utterly gone to the bad!"

"To the what?" I queried, taking him up short. This officer, with the pudding cheeks and patronizing insolence, had a provoking trick of always keeping just inside the bounds of what one might resent. "To the what, did you say Hamilton had gone?"

"To the domestics," says he laughing, then to the others, as if he had listened to every word of the explanations, "and if His Little Excellency, Governor MacDonell, by the grace of Lord Selkirk, ruler over gentlemen adventurers in no-man's-land, expels the good Nor'-Westers from nowhere to somewhere else, what do the good Nor'-Westers intend doing to the Little Tyrant?"

"Charles the First him," responds a wag of the club.

"Where's your Cromwell?" laughs the colonel.

"Our Cromwell's a Cameron, temper of a Lucifer, oaths before action," answers the wag.

"Tuts!" exclaims Uncle Jack testily. "We'll settle His Lordship's little martinet of the plains. Warrant for his arrest! Fetch him out!"

"Warrant 43rd King George III. will do it," added one of the partners who had looked the matter up.

"43rd King George III. doesn't give jurisdiction for trial in Lower Canada, if offense be committed elsewhere," interjects a lawyer with show of importance.

"A Daniel come to judgment," laughs the colonel, winking as my uncle's wrath rose.

"Pah!" says Mr. Jack MacKenzie in disgust, stamping on the floor with both feet. "You lawyers needn't think you'll have your pickings when fur companies quarrel. We'll ship him out, that's all. Neither of the companies wants to advertise its profits—"

"Or its methods—ahem!" interjects the colonel.

"And its private business," adds my uncle, looking daggers at Adderly, "by going to court."

Then they all rose to go to the dining-room; and as I stepped out to have a look down the street for Hamilton, I heard Colonel Adderly's last fling—"Pretty rascals, you gentlemen adventurers are, so shy and coy about law courts."

It was a dark night, with a few lonely stars in mid-heaven, a sickle moon cutting the horizon cloud-rim and a noisy March wind that boded snow from The Labrador, or sleet from the Gulf.

When Eric Hamilton left the Hudson's Bay Company's service at York Factory on Hudson Bay and came to live in Quebec, I was but a student at Laval. It was at my Uncle MacKenzie's that I met the tall, dark, sinewy, taciturn man, whose influence was to play such a strange part in my life; and when these two talked of their adventures in the far, lone land of the north, I could no more conceal my awe-struck admiration than a girl could on first discovering her own charms in a looking-glass. I think he must have noticed my boyish reverence, for once he condescended to ask about the velvet cap and green sash and long blue coat which made up the Laval costume, and in a moment I was talking to him as volubly as if he were the boy and I, the great Hudson's Bay trader.

"It makes me feel quite like a boy again," he had said on resuming conversation with Mr. MacKenzie. "By Jove! Sir, I can hardly realize I went into that country a lad of fifteen, like your nephew, and here I am, out of it, an old man."

"Pah, Eric man," says my uncle, "you'll be finding a wife one of these days and renewing your youth."

"Uncle," I broke out when the Hudson's Bay man had gone home, "how old is Mr. Hamilton?"

"Fifteen years older than you are, boy, and I pray Heaven you may have half as much of the man in you at thirty as he has," returns my uncle mentally measuring me with that stern eye of his. At that information, my heart gave a curious, jubilant thud. Henceforth, I no longer looked upon Mr. Hamilton with the same awe that a choir boy entertains for a bishop. Something of comradeship sprang up between us, and before that year had passed we were as boon companions as man and boy could be. But Hamilton presently spoiled it all by fulfilling my uncle's prediction and finding a wife, a beautiful, fair-haired, frail slip of a girl, near enough the twenties to patronize me and too much of the young lady to find pleasure in an awkward lad. That meant an end to our rides and walks and sails down the St. Lawrence and long evening talks; but I took my revenge by assuming the airs of a man of forty, at which Hamilton quizzed me not a little and his wife, Miriam, laughed. When I surprised them all by jumping suddenly from boyhood to manhood—"like a tadpole into a mosquito," as my Uncle Jack facetiously remarked. Meanwhile, a son and heir came to my friend's home and I had to be thankful for a humble third place.

And so it came that I was waiting for Eric's arrival at the Quebec Club that night, peering from the porch for sight of him and calculating how long it would take to ride from the Chateau Bigot above Charlesbourg, where he was staying. Stepping outside, I was surprised to see the form of a horse beneath the lantern of the arched gateway; and my surprise increased on nearer inspection. As I walked up, the creature gave a whinny and I recognized Hamilton's horse, lathered with sweat, unblanketed and shivering. The possibility of an accident hardly suggested itself before I observed the bridle-rein had been slung over the hitching-post and heard steps hurrying to the side door of the club-house.

"Is that you, Eric?" I called.

There was no answer; so I led the horse to the stable boy and hurried back to see if Hamilton were inside. The sitting room was deserted; but Eric's well-known, tall figure was entering the dining-room. And a curious figure he presented to the questioning looks of the club men. In one hand was his riding whip, in the other, his gloves. He wore the buckskin coat of a trapper and in the belt were two pistols. One sleeve was torn from wrist to elbow and his boots were scratched as if they had been combed by an iron rake. His broad-brimmed hat was still on, slouched down over his eyes like that of a scout.

"Gad! Hamilton," exclaimed Uncle Jack MacKenzie, who was facing Eric as I came up behind, "have you been in a race or a fight?" and he gave him the look of suspicion one might give an intoxicated man.

"Is it a cold night?" asked the colonel punctiliously, gazing hard at the still-strapped hat.

Not a word came from Hamilton.

"How's the cold in your head?" continued Adderly, pompously trying to stare Hamilton's hat off.

"Here I am, old man! What's kept you?" and I rushed forward but quickly checked myself; for Hamilton turned slowly towards me and instead of erect bearing, clear glance, firm mouth, I saw a head that was bowed, eyes that burned like fire, and parched, parted, wordless lips.

If the colonel had not been stuffing himself like the turkey guzzler that he was, he would have seen something unspeakably terrible written on Hamilton's silent face.

"Did the little wifie let him off for a night's play?" sneered Adderly.

Barely were the words out, when Hamilton's teeth clenched behind the open lips, giving him an ugly, furious expression, strange to his face. He took a quick stride towards the officer, raised his whip and brought it down with the full strength of his shoulder in one cutting blow across the baggy, purplish cheeks of the insolent speaker.

CHAPTER II

A STRONG MAN IS BOWED

The whole thing was so unexpected that for one moment not a man in the room drew breath. Then the colonel sprang up with the bellow of an enraged bull, overturning the table in his rush, and a dozen club members were pulling him back from Eric.

"Eric Hamilton, are you mad?" I cried. "What do you mean?"

But Hamilton stood motionless as if he saw none of us. Except that his breath was labored, he wore precisely the same strange, distracted air he had on entering the club.

"Hold back!" I implored; for Adderly was striking right and left to get free from the men. "Hold back! There's a mistake! Something's wrong!"

"Reptile!" roared the colonel. "Cowardly reptile, you shall pay for this!"

"There's a mistake," I shouted, above the clamor of exclamations.

"Glad the mistake landed where it did, all the same," whispered Uncle Jack MacKenzie in my ear, "but get him out of this. Drunk—or a scandal," says my uncle, who always expressed himself in explosives when excited. "Side room—here—lead him in—drunk—by Jove—drunk!"

"Never," I returned passionately. I knew both Hamilton and his wife too well to tolerate either insinuation. But we led him like a dazed being into a side office, where Mr. Jack MacKenzie promptly turned the key and took up a posture with his back against the door.

"Now, Sir," he broke out sternly, "if it's neither drink, nor a scandal——" There, he stopped; for Hamilton, utterly unconscious of us, moved, rather than walked, automatically across the room. Throwing his hat down, he bowed his head over both arms above the mantel-piece.

My uncle and I looked from the silent man to each other. Raising his brows in question, Mr. Jack MacKenzie touched his forehead and whispered across to me—"Mad?"

At that, though the word was spoken barely above a breath, Eric turned slowly round and faced us with blood-shot, gleaming eyes. He made as though he would speak, sank into the armchair before the grate and pressed both hands against his forehead.

"Mad," he repeated in a voice low as a moan, framing his words slowly and with great effort. "By Jove, men, you should know me better than to mouth such rot under your breath. To-night, I'd sell my soul, sell my soul to be mad, really mad, to know that all I think has happened, hadn't happened at all—" and his speech was broken by a sharp intake of breath.

"Out with it, man, for the Lord's sake," shouted my uncle, now convinced that Eric was not drunk and jumping to conclusions—as he was wont to do when excited—regarding a possible scandal.

"Out with it, man! We'll stand by you! Has that blasted red-faced turkey——"

"Pray, spare your histrionics, for the present," Eric cut in with the icy self-possession bred by a lifetime's danger, dispelling my uncle's second suspicion with a quiet scorn that revealed nothing.

"What the——" began my kinsman, "what did you strike him for?"

"Did I strike somebody?" asked Hamilton absently.

Again my uncle flashed a questioning look at me, but this time his face showed his conviction so plainly no word was needed.

"Did I strike somebody? Wish you'd apologize——"

"Apologize!" thundered my uncle. "I'll do nothing of the kind. Served him right. 'Twas a pretty way, a pretty way, indeed, to speak of any man's wife——" But the word "wife" had not been uttered before Eric threw out his hands in an imploring gesture.

"Don't!" he cried out sharply in the suffering tone of a man under the operating knife. "Don't! It all comes back! It is true! It is true! I can't get away from it! It is no nightmare. My God, men, how can I tell you? There's no way of saying it! It is impossible—preposterous—some monstrous joke—it's quite impossible I tell you—it couldn't have happened—such things don't happen—couldn't happen—to her—of all women! But she's gone—she's gone——"

"See here, Hamilton," cried my uncle, utterly beside himself with excitement, "are we to understand you are talking of your wife, or—or some other woman?"

"See here, Hamilton," I reiterated, quite heedless of the brutality of our questions and with a thousand wild suspicions flashing into my mind. "Is it your wife, Miriam, and your boy?"

But he heard neither of us.

"They were there—they waved to me from the garden at the edge of the woods as I entered the forest. Only this morning, both waving to me as I rode away—and when I returned from the city at noon, they were gone! I looked to the window as I came back. The curtain moved and I thought my boy was hiding, but it was only the wind. We've searched every nook from cellar to attic. His toys were littered about and I fancied I heard his voice everywhere, but no! No—no—and we've been hunting house and garden for hours——"

"And the forest?" questioned Uncle Jack, the trapper instinct of former days suddenly re-awakening.

"The forest is waist-deep with snow! Besides we beat through the bush everywhere, and there wasn't a track, nor broken twig, where they could have passed." His torn clothes bore evidence to the thoroughness of that search.

"Nonsense," my uncle burst out, beginning to bluster. "They've been driven to town without leaving word!"

"No sleigh was at Chateau Bigot this morning," returned Hamilton.

"But the road, Eric?" I questioned, recalling how the old manor-house stood well back in the center of a cleared plateau in the forest. "Couldn't they have gone down the road to those Indian encampments?"

"The road is impassable for sleighs, let alone walking, and their winter wraps are all in the house. For Heaven's sake, men, suggest something! Don't madden me with these useless questions!"

But in spite of Eric's entreaty my excitable kinsman subjected the frenzied man to such a fire of questions as might have sublimated pre-natal knowledge. And I stood back listening and pieced the distracted, broken answers into some sort of coherency till the whole tragic scene at the Chateau on that spring day of the year 1815, became ineffaceably stamped on my memory.

Causeless, with neither warning nor the slightest premonition of danger, the greatest curse which can befall a man came upon my friend Eric Hamilton. However fond a husband may be, there are things worse for his wife than death which he may well dread, and it was one of these tragedies which almost drove poor Hamilton out of his reason and changed the whole course of my own life. In broad daylight, his young wife and infant son disappeared as suddenly and completely as if blotted out of existence.

That morning, Eric light-heartedly kissed wife and child good-by and waved them a farewell that was to be the last. He rode down the winding forest path to Quebec and they stood where the Chateau garden merged into the forest of Charlesbourg Mountain. At noon, when he returned, for him there existed neither wife nor child. For any trace of them that could be found, both might have been supernaturally spirited away. The great house, that had re-echoed to the boy's prattle, was deathly still; and neither wife, nor child, answered his call. The nurse was summoned. She was positive Madame was amusing the boy across the hall, and reassuringly bustled off to find mother and son in the next room, and the next, and yet the next; to discover each in succession empty.

Alarm spread to the Chateau servants. The simple habitant maids were questioned, but their only response was white-faced, blank amazement.

Madame not returned!

Madame not back!

Mon Dieu! What had happened? And all the superstition of hillside lore added to the fear on each anxious face. Shortly after Monsieur went to the city, Madame had taken her little son out as usual for a morning airing, and had been seen walking up and down the paths tracked through the garden snow. Had Monsieur examined the clearing between the house and the forest? Monsieur could see for himself the snow was too deep and crusty among the trees for Madame to go twenty paces into the woods. Besides, foot-marks could be traced from the garden to the bush. He need not fear wild animals. They were receding into the mountains as spring advanced. Let him take another look about the open; and Hamilton tore out-doors, followed by the whole household; but from the Chateau in the center of the glade to the encircling border of snow-laden evergreens there was no trace of wife or child.

Then Eric laughed at his own growing fears. Miriam must be in the house. So the search of the old hall, that had once resounded to the drunken tread of gay French grandees, began again. From hidden chamber in the vaulted cellar to attic rooms above, not a corner of the Chateau was left unexplored. Had any one come and driven her to the city? But that was impossible. The roads were drifted the height of a horse and there were no marks of sleigh runners on either side of the riding path. Could she possibly have ventured a few yards down the main road to an encampment of Indians, whose squaws after Indian custom made much of the white baby? Neither did that suggestion bring relief; for the Indians had broken camp early in the morning and there was only a dirty patch of littered snow, where the wigwams had been.

The alarm now became a panic. Hamilton, half-crazed and unable to believe his own senses, began wondering whether he had nightmare. He thought he might waken up presently and find the dead weight smothering his chest had been the boy snuggling close. He was vaguely conscious it was strange of him to continue sleeping with that noise of shouting men and whining hounds and snapping branches going on in the forest. The child's lightest cry generally broke the spell of a nightmare; but the din of terrified searchers rushing through the woods and of echoes rolling eerily back from the white hills convinced him this was no dream-land. Then, the distinct crackle of trampled brushwood and the scratch of spines across his face called him back to an unendurable reality.

"The thing is utterly impossible, Hamilton," I cried, when in short jerky sentences, as if afraid to give thought rein, he had answered my uncle's questioning. "Impossible! Utterly impossible!"

"I would to God it were!" he moaned.

"It was daylight, Eric?" asked Mr. Jack MacKenzie.

He nodded moodily.

"And she couldn't be lost in Charlesbourg forest?" I added, taking up the interrogations where my uncle left off.

"No trace—not a footprint!"

"And you're quite sure she isn't in the house?" replied my relative.

"Quite!" he answered passionately.

"And there was an Indian encampment a few yards down the road?" continued Mr. MacKenzie, undeterred.

"Oh! What has that to do with it?" he asked petulantly, springing to his feet. "They'd moved off long before I went back. Besides, Indians don't run off with white women. Haven't I spent my life among them? I should know their ways!"

"But my dear fellow!" responded the elder trader, "so do I know their ways. If she isn't in the Chateau and isn't in the woods and isn't in the garden, can't you see, the Indian encampment is the only possible explanation?"

The lines on his face deepened. Fire flashed from his gleaming eyes, and if ever I have seen murder written on the countenance of man, it was on Hamilton's.

"What tribe were they, anyway?" I asked, trying to speak indifferently, for every question was knife-play on a wound.

"Mongrel curs, neither one thing nor the other, Iroquois canoemen, French half-breeds intermarried with Sioux squaws! They're all connected with the North-West Company's crews. The Nor'-Westers leave here for Fort William when the ice breaks up. This riff-raff will follow in their own dug-outs!"

"Know any of them?" persisted my uncle.

"No, I don't think I—Let me see! By Jove! Yes, Gillespie!" he shouted, "Le Grand Diable was among them!"

"What about Diable?" I asked, pinning him down to the subject, for his mind was lost in angry memories.

"What about him? He's my one enemy among the Indians," he answered in tones thick and ominously low. "I thrashed him within an inch of his life at Isle à la Crosse. Being a Nor'-Wester, he thought it fine game to pillage the kit of a Hudson's Bay; so he stole a silver-mounted fowling-piece which my grandfather had at Culloden. By Jove, Gillespie! The Nor'-Westers have a deal of blood to answer for, stirring up those Indians against traders; and if they've brought this on me——"

"Did you get it back?" I interrupted, referring to the fowling-piece, neither my uncle, nor I, offering any defense for the Nor'-Westers. I knew there were two sides to this complaint from a Hudson's Bay man.

"No! That's why I nearly finished him; but the more I clubbed, the more he jabbered impertinence, 'Cooloo! cooloo! qu' importe! It doesn't matter!' By Jove! I made it matter!"

"Is that all about Diable, Eric?" continued my uncle.

He ran his fingers distractedly back through his long, black hair, rose, and, coming over to me, laid a trembling hand on each shoulder.

"Gillespie!" he muttered through hard-set teeth. "It isn't all. I didn't think at the time, but the morning after the row with that red devil I found a dagger stuck on the outside of my hut-door. The point was through a fresh sprouted leaflet. A withered twig hung over the blade."

"Man! Are you mad?" cried Jack MacKenzie. "He must be the very devil himself. You weren't married then—He couldn't mean——"

"I thought it was an Indian threat," interjected Hamilton, "that if I had downed him in the fall, when the branches were bare, he meant to have his revenge in spring when the leaves were green; but you know I left the country that fall."

"You were wrong, Eric!" I blurted out impetuously, the terrible significance of that threat dawning upon me. "That wasn't the meaning at all."

Then I stopped; for Hamilton was like a palsied man, and no one asked what those tokens of a leaflet pierced by a dagger and an old branch hanging to the knife might mean.

Mr. Jack MacKenzie was the first to pull himself together.

"Come," he shouted. "Gather up your wits! To the camping ground!" and he threw open the door.

Thereupon, we three flung through the club-room to the astonishment of the gossips, who had been waiting outside for developments in the quarrel with Colonel Adderly. At the outer porch, Hamilton laid a hand on Mr. MacKenzie's shoulder.

"Don't come," he begged hurriedly. "There's a storm blowing. It's rough weather, and a rough road, full of drifts! Make my peace with the man I struck."

Then Eric and I whisked out into the blackness of a boisterous, windy night. A moment later, our horses were dashing over iced cobble-stones with the clatter of pistol-shots.

"It will snow," said I, feeling a few flakes driven through the darkness against my face; but to this remark Hamilton was heedless.

"It will snow, Eric," I repeated. "The wind's veered north. We must get out to the camp before all traces are covered. How far by the Beauport road?"

"Five miles," said he, and I knew by the sudden scream and plunge of his horse that spurs were dug into raw sides. We turned down that steep, break-neck, tortuous street leading from Upper Town to the valley of the St. Charles. The wet thaw of mid-day had frozen and the road was slippery as a toboggan slide. We reined our horses in tightly, to prevent a perilous stumbling of fore-feet, and by zigzagging from side to side managed to reach the foot of the hill without a single fall. Here, we again gave them the bit; and we were presently thundering across the bridge in a way that brought the keeper out cursing and yelling for his toll. I tossed a coin over my shoulder and we galloped up the elm-lined avenue leading to that Charlesbourg retreat, where French Bacchanalians caroused before the British conquest, passed the thatch-roofed cots of habitants and, turning suddenly to the right, followed a seldom frequented road, where snow was drifted heavily. Here we had to slacken pace, our beasts sinking to their haunches and snorting through the white billows like a modern snow-plow.

Hamilton had spoken not a word.

Clouds were massing on the north. Overhead a few stars glittered against the black, and the angry wind had the most mournful wail I have ever heard. How the weird undertones came like the cries of a tortured child, and the loud gusts with the shriek of demons!

"Gillespie," called Eric's voice tremulous with anguish, "listen—Rufus—listen! Do you hear anything? Do you hear any one calling for help? Is that a child crying?"

"No, Eric, old man," said I, shivering in my saddle. "I hear—I hear nothing at all but the wind."

But my hesitancy belied the truth of that answer; for we both heard sounds, which no one can interpret but he whose well beloved is lost in the storm.

And the wind burst upon us again, catching my empty denial and tossing the words to upper air with eldritch laughter. Then there was a lull, and I felt rather than heard the choking back of stifled moans and knew that the man by my side, who had held iron grip of himself before other eyes, was now giving vent to grief in the blackness of night.

At last a red light gleamed from the window of a low cot. That was the signal for us to turn abruptly to the left, entering the forest by a narrow bridle-path that twisted among the cedars. As if to look down in pity, the moon shone for a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and all the snow-laden evergreens stood out stately, shadowy and spectral, like mourners for the dead.

Again the road took to right-about at a sharp angle and the broad Chateau, with its noble portico and numerous windows all alight, suddenly loomed up in the center of a forest-clearing on the mountain side. Where the path to the garden crossed a frozen stream was a small open space. Here the Indians had been encamped. We hallooed for servants and by lantern light examined every square inch of the smoked snow and rubbish heaps. Bits of tin in profusion, stones for the fire, tent canvas, ends of ropes and tattered rags lay everywhere over the black patch. Snow was beginning to fall heavily in great flakes that obscured earth and air. Not a thing had we found to indicate any trace of the lost woman and child, until I caught sight of a tiny, blue string beneath a piece of rusty metal. Kicking the tin aside, I caught the ribbon up. When I saw on the lower end a child's finely beaded moccasin, I confess I had rather felt the point of Le Grand Diable's dagger at my own heart than have shown that simple thing to Hamilton.

Then the snow-storm broke upon us in white billows blotting out everything. We spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the campers, but the drifting wind drove us indoors and we were compelled to cease searching. All night long Eric and I sat before the roaring grate fire of the hunting-room, he leaning forward with chin in his palms and saying few words, I offering futile suggestions and uttering mad threats, but both utterly at a loss what to do. We knew enough of Indian character to know what not to do. That was, raise an outcry, which might hasten the cruelty of Le Grand Diable.

CHAPTER III.

NOVICE AND EXPERT.

Though many years have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of 1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced waiting, I still hear the roaring of the northern gale, driving round the house-corners as if it would wrench all eaves from the roof. It shrieked across the garden like malignant furies, rushed with the boom of a sea through the cedars and pines, and tore up the mountain slope till all the many voices of the forest were echoing back a thousand tumultuous discords. Again, I see Hamilton gazing at the leaping flames of the log fire, as if their frenzied motion reflected something of his own burning grief. Then, the agony of our utter helplessness, as long as the storm raged, would prove too great for his self-control. Rising, he would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room till his eye would be caught by some object with which the boy had played. He would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the dead. Afterwards, lanterns, which we had placed on the oak center table on coming in, began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell, and each of us involuntarily walked across to a window and drew aside the curtains to see how daylight was coming on. The white glare of early morning flooded the room, but the snow-storm had changed to driving sleet and the panes were iced from corner to corner with frozen rain-drift. How we dragged through two more days, while the gale raved with unabated fury, I do not know. Poor Eric was for rushing into the blinding whirl, that turned earth and air into one white tornado; but he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and we prevailed on him to come back. On the third night, the wind fell like a thing that had fretted out its strength. Morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts, crusted over by the frozen sleet and reflecting a white dazzle that made one's eyes blink. Great icicles hung from the naked branches of the sheeted pines and snow was wreathed in fantastic forms among the cedars.

We had laid our plans while we waited. After lifting the canvas from the camping-ground and seeking in vain for more trace of the fugitives, we despatched a dozen different search-parties that very morning, Eric leading those who were to go on the river-side of the Chateau, and I some well-trained bushrangers picked from the habitants of the hillside, who could track the forest to every Indian haunt within a week's march of the city. After putting my men on a trail with instructions to send back an Indian courier to report each night, I hunted up an old habitant guide, named Paul Larocque, who had often helped me to thread the woods of Quebec after big game. Now Paul was habitually as silent as a dumb animal, and sportsmen had nicknamed him The Mute; but what he lacked in speech he made up like other wild creatures in a wonderful acuteness of eye and ear. Indeed, it was commonly believed among trappers that Paul possessed some nameless sense by which he could actually feel the presence of an enemy before ordinary men could either see, or hear. For my part, I would be willing to pit that "feel" of Paul's against the nose of any hound that dog-fanciers could back.

"Paul," said I, as the habitant stood before me licking the short stem of an inverted clay pipe, "there's an Indian, a bad Indian, an Iroquois, Paul,"—I was particular in describing the Indian as an Iroquois, for Paul's wife was a Huron from Lorette—"An Iroquois, who stole a white woman and a little boy from the Chateau three days ago, in the morning."

There, I paused to let the facts soak in; for The Mute digested information in small morsels. Grizzled, stunted and chunky, he was not at all the picturesque figure which fancy has painted of his class. Instead of the red toque, which artists place on the heads of habitants, he wore a cloth cap with ear flaps coming down to be tied under his chin. His jacket was an ill-fitting garment, the cast-off coat of some well-to-do man, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above brightly beaded moccasins. When I paused, Paul fixed his eyes on an invisible spot in the snow and ruminated. Then he hitched the baggy trousers up, pulled the red scarf, that held them to his waist, tighter, and, taking his eyes off the snow, looked up for me to go on.

"That Iroquois, who belongs to the North-West trappers——"

"Pays d'En Haut?" asks Paul, speaking for the first time.

"Yes," I answered, "and they all disappeared with the woman and the child the day before the storm."

The Mute's eyes were back on the snow.

"Now," said I, "I'll make you a rich man if you take me straight to the place where he's hiding."

Paul's eyes looked up with the question of how much.

"Five pounds a day." This was four more than we paid for the cariboo hunts.

Again he stood thinking, then darted off into the forest like a hare; but I knew his strange, silent ways, and confidently awaited his return. How he could get two pair of snow-shoes and two poles inside of five minutes, I do not attempt to explain, unless some of his numerous half-breed youngsters were at hand in the woods; but he was back again all equipped for a long tramp, and as soon as I had laced on the racquets, we were skimming over the drift like a boat on billows. In the mazy confusion of snow and underbrush, no one but Paul would have found and kept that tangled, forest path. Where great trunks had fallen across the way, Paul planted his pole and took the barrier at a bound. Then he raced on at a gait which was neither a run nor a walk, but an easy trot common to the coureurs-des-bois. The encased branches snapped like glass when we brushed past, and so heavily were snow and icicles frozen to the trees we might have been in some grotesque crystal-walled cavern. The habitant spoke not a word, but on we pressed over the brushwood, now so packed with snow and crusted ice, our snow-shoes were not once tripped by loose branches, and we glided from drift to drift. In vain I tried to discern a trail by the broken thicket on either side, and I noticed that my guide was keeping his course by following the marks blazed on trees. At one place we came to a steep, clear slope, where the earth had fallen sheer away from the hillside and snow had filled the incline. First prodding forward to feel if the snow-bank were solid, Paul promptly sat down on the rear end of his snow-shoes, and, quicker than I can tell it, tobogganed down to the valley. I came leaping clumsily from point to point with my pole, like a ski-jumping Norwegian, risking my neck at every bound. Then we coursed along the valley, the habitant's eyes still on the trees, and once he stopped to emit a gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up sap trough; but I could not divine whether Paul's mirth were over a prospect of sugaring-off in the maple-woods, or at some foolish habitant who had tapped the maple too early. How often had I known my guide to exhaust city athletes in these swift marches of his! But I had been schooled to his pace from boyhood and kept up with him at every step, though we were going so fast I lost all track of my bearings.

"Where to, Paul?" I asked with a vague suspicion that we were heading for the Huron village at Lorette. "To Lorette, Paul?"

But Paul condescended only a grunt and whisked suddenly round a headland up a narrow gorge, which seemed to lead to the very heart of the mountains and might have sheltered any number of fugitives. In the gorge we stopped to take a light meal of gingerbread horses—a cake that is the peculiar glory of the habitant—dried herrings and sea biscuits. By the sun, I knew it was long past noon and that we had been traveling northwest. I also vaguely guessed that Paul's object was to intercept the North-West trappers, if they had planned to slip away from the St. Lawrence through the bush to the Upper Ottawa, where they could meet north-bound boats. But not one syllable had my taciturn guide uttered. Clambering up the steep, snowy banks of the gorge, we found ourselves in the upper reaches of a mountain, where the trees fell away in scraggy clumps and the snow stretched up clear and unbroken to the hill-crest. Paul grunted, licked his pipe-stem significantly and pointed his pole to the hill-top. The dark peak of a solitary wigwam appeared above the snow. He pointed again to the fringe of woods below us. A dozen wigwams were visible among the trees and smoke curled up from a central camp-fire.

"Voilà, Monsieur?" said the habitant, which made four words for that day.

The Mute then fell to my rear and we first approached the general camp. The campers were evidently thieves as well as hunters; for frozen pork hung with venison from the branches of several trees. The sap trough might also have belonged to them, which would explain Paul's laugh, as the whole paraphernalia of a sugaring-off was on the outskirts of the encampment.

"Not the Indians we're after," said I, noting the signs of permanency; but Paul Larocque shoved me forward with the end of his pole and a curious, almost intelligent, expression came on the dull, pock-pitted face. Strangely enough, as I looked over my shoulder to the guide, I caught sight of an Indian figure climbing up the bank in our very tracks. The significance of this incident was to reveal itself later.

As usual, a pack of savage dogs flew out to announce our coming with furious barking. But I declare the habitant was so much like any ragged Indian, the creatures recognized him and left off their vicious snarl. Only the shrill-voiced children, who rushed from the wigwams; evinced either surprise or interest in our arrival. Men and women were haunched about the fire, above which simmered several pots with the savory odor of cooking meat. I do not think a soul of the company as much as turned a head on our approach. Though they saw us plainly, they sat stolid and imperturbable, after the manner of their race, waiting for us to announce ourselves. Some of the squaws and half-breed women were heaping bark on the fire. Indians sat straight-backed round the circle. White men, vagabond trappers from anywhere and everywhere, lay in all variety of lazy attitudes on buffalo robes and caribou skins.

I had known, as every one familiar with Quebec's family histories must know, that the sons of old seigneurs sometimes inherited the adventurous spirit, which led their ancestors of three centuries ago to exchange the gayeties of the French court for the wild life of the new world. I was aware this spirit frequently transformed seigneurs into bush-rangers and descendants of the royal blood into coureurs-des-bois. But it is one thing to know a fact, another to see that fact in living embodiment; and in this case, the living embodiment was Louis Laplante, a school-fellow of Laval, whom, to my amazement, I now saw, with a beard of some months' growth and clad in buckskin, lying at full length on his back among that villainous band of nondescript trappers. Something of the surprise I felt must have shown on my face, for as Louis recognized me he uttered a shout of laughter.

"Hullo, Gillespie!" he called with the saucy nonchalance which made him both a favorite and a torment at the seminary. "Are you among the prophets?" and he sat up making room for me on his buffalo robe.

"I'll wager, Louis," said I, shaking his hand heartily and accepting the proffered seat, "I'll wager it's prophets spelt with an 'f' brings you here." For the young rake had been one of the most notorious borrowers at the seminary.

"Good boy!" laughed he, giving my shoulder a clap. "I see your time was not wasted with me. Now, what the devil," he asked as I surveyed the motley throng of fat, coarse-faced squaws and hard-looking men who surrounded him, "now, what the devil's brought you here?"

"What's the same, to yourself, Louis lad?" said I. He laughed the merry, heedless laugh that had been the distraction of the class-room.

"Do you need to ask with such a galaxy of nut-brown maidens?" and Louis looked with the assurance of privileged impudence straight across the fire into the hideous, angry face of a big squaw, who was glaring at me. The creature was one to command attention. She might have been a great, bronze statue, a type of some ancient goddess, a symbol of fury, or cruelty. Her eyes fastened themselves on mine and held me, whether I would or no, while her whole face darkened.

"The lady evidently objects to having her place usurped, Louis," I remarked, for he was watching the silent duel between the native woman's questioning eyes and mine.

"The gentleman wants to know if the lady objects to having her place usurped?" called Louis to the squaw.

At that the woman flinched and looked to Laplante. Of course, she did not understand our words; but I think she was suspicious we were laughing at her. There was a vindictive flash across her face, then the usual impenetrable expression of the Indian came over her features. I noticed that her cheeks and forehead were scarred, and a cut had laid open her upper lip from nose to teeth.

"You must know that the lady is the daughter of a chief and a fighter," whispered Louis in my ear.

I might have known she was above common rank from the extraordinary number of trinkets she wore. Pendants hung from her ears like the pendulum of a clock. She had a double necklace of polished bear's claws and around her waist was a girdle of agates, which to me proclaimed that she was of a far-western tribe. In the girdle was an ivory-handled knife, which had doubtless given as many scars as its owner displayed.

"What tribe, Louis?" I asked.

"I'll be hanged, now, if I'm not jealous," he began. "You'll stare the lady out of countenance——" But at this moment the Indian who had come up the bank behind us came round and interrupted Laplante's merriment by tossing a piece of bethumbed paper between my comrade's knees.

"The deuce!" exclaimed Louis, bulging his tongue into one cheek and glancing at me with a queer, quizzical look as he unfolded and read the paper.

If he had not spoken I might not have turned; but having turned I could not but notice two things. Louis jerked back from me, as if I might try to read the soiled note in his hand, and in raising the paper displayed on the back the stamp of the commissariat department from Quebec Citadel.

Neither Laplante's suppressed surprise, nor my observations of his movement, escaped the big squaw. She came quickly round the fire to us both.

"Give me that," she commanded, holding out her hand to the French youth.

"The deuce I will," he returned, twisting the paper up in his clenched fist. Half in jest, half in earnest, just as Louis used to be punished at the seminary, she gave him a prompt box on the ear. He took it in perfect good-nature. And the whole encampment laughed. The squaw went back to the other side of the fire. Laplante leaned forward and threw the paper towards the flames; but without his knowledge, he overshot the mark; and when the trader was looking elsewhere the big squaw stooped, picked up the coveted note and slipped it into her skirt pocket.

"Now, Louis, nonsense aside," I began.

"With all my soul, if I have one," said he, lying back languidly with a perceptible cooling of the cordiality he had first evinced.

I told him my errand, and that I wished to search every wigwam for trace of the lost woman and child. He listened with shut eyes.

"It isn't," I explained in a low voice, eager to arouse his interest, "it isn't in the least, Laplante, that we suspect these people; but you know the kidnappers might have traded the clothing to your people——"

"Oh! Go ahead!" he interjected impatiently. "Don't beat round the bush! What do you want of me?"

"To go through the tents with me and help me. By Jove! Laplante! I thought at least a spark of the man would suggest that without my speaking," I broke out hotly.

He was on his feet with an alacrity that brought old Paul Larocque round to my side and the squaw to his.

"Curse you," he cried out roughly, shoving the squaw back. For a moment I was uncertain whether he were addressing the woman or myself. "You mind your own business and go to your Indian! Here, Gillespie, I'll do the tents with you. Get off with you," he muttered at the squaw, rumbling out a lingo of persuasive expletives; and he led the way to the first wigwam.

But the squaw was not to be dismissed; for when I followed the Frenchman, she closed in behind looking thunder, not at her abuser, but at me; and The Mute, fearing foul play and pole in hand, loyally brought up the rear of our strange procession. I shall not retail that search through robes and skins and blankets and boxes, in foul-smelling, vermin-infested wigwams. It was fruitless. I only recall the lowering face of the big squaw looking over my shoulder at every turn, with heavy brows contracted and gashed lips grinning an evil, malicious challenge. I thought she kept her hands uncomfortably near the ivory handle in the agate belt; but Larocque, good fellow, never took his beady eyes off those same hands and kept a grip of the leaping pole.

Thus we examined the tents and made a circuit of the people round the fire, but found nothing to reveal the whereabouts of Miriam and the child. Laplante and I were on one side of the robe, Larocque and the squaw on the other.

"And why is that tent apart from the rest and who is in it?" I asked Laplante, pointing to the lone tepee on the crest of the hill.

The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence among the loungers of the camp. They were listening as well as watching. Up to this time I had not thought they were paying the slightest attention to us. Laplante was not answering, and when I faced him suddenly I found the squaw's eyes fastened on his, holding them whether he would or no, just as she had mine.

"Eh! man?" I cried, seizing him fiercely, a nameless suspicion getting possession of me. "Why don't you answer?"

The spell was broken. He turned to me nonchalantly, as he used to face accusers in the school-days of long ago, and spoke almost gently, with downcast eyes, and a quiet, deprecating smile.

"You know, Rufus," he answered, using the schoolboy name. "We should have told you before. But remember we didn't invite you here. We didn't lead you into it."

"Well?" I demanded.

"Well," he replied in a voice too low for any of the listeners but the squaw to hear, "there's a very bad case of smallpox up in that tent and we're keeping the man apart till he gets better. That, in fact, is why we're all here. You must go. It is not safe."

"Thanks, Laplante," said I. "Good-by." But he did not offer me his hand when I made to take leave.

"Come," he said. "I'll go as far as the gorge with you;" and he stood on the embankment and waved as we passed into the lengthening shadows of the valley.

Now, in these days of health officers and vaccination, people can have no idea of the terrors of a smallpox scourge at the beginning of this century. The habitant is as indifferent to smallpox as to measles, and accepts both as dispensations of Providence by exposing his children to the contagion as early as possible; but I was not so minded, and hurried down the gorge as fast as my snow-shoes would carry me. Then I remembered that the Indian population of the north had been reduced to a skeleton of its former numbers by the pestilence in 1780, and recalled that my Uncle Jack had said the native's superstitious dread of this disease knew no bounds. That recollection checked my sudden flight. If the Indians had such fear, why had this band camped within a mile of the pest tent? It would be more like Indian character to reverse Samaritan practises and leave the victim to die. This man might, of course, be a French-Canadian trapper, but I would take no risks of a trick, so I ordered Paul to lead me back to that tepee.

The Mute seemed to understand I had no wish to be seen by the campers. He skirted round the base of the hill till we were on the side remote from the tribe. Then he motioned me to remain in the gorge while he scrambled up the cliff to reconnoitre. I knew he received a surprise as soon as his head was on a level with the top of the bank; for he curled himself up behind a snow-pile and gave a low whistle for me. I was beside him with one bound. We were not twenty pole-lengths from the wigwam. There was no appearance of life. The tent flaps had been laced up and a solitary watch-dog was tied to a stake before the entrance. Down the valley the setting sun shone through the naked trees like a wall of fire, and dyed all the glistening snow-drifts primrose and opal. At one place in the forest the red light burst through and struck against the tent on the hill-top, giving the skins a peculiar appearance of being streaked with blood. The faintest breath of wind, a mere sigh of moving air-currents peculiar to snow-padded areas, came up from the woods with far-away echoes of the trappers' voices. Perhaps this was heard by the watch-dog, or it may have felt the disturbing presence of my half-wild habitant guide; for it sat back on its haunches and throwing up its head, let out the most doleful howlings imaginable.

"Oh! Monsieur," shuddered out the superstitious habitant shivering like an aspen leaf, "sick man moan,—moan,—moan hard! He die, Monsieur, he die, he die now when dog cry lak dat," and full of fear he scrambled down into the gorge, making silent gestures for me to follow.

For a time—but not long, I must acknowledge—I lay there alone, watching and listening. Paul's ears might hear the moans of a sick man, mine could not: nor would I return to the Chateau without ascertaining for a certainty what was in that wigwam. Slipping off the snow-shoes, I rose and tip-toed over the snow with the full intention of silencing the dog with my pole; but I was suddenly arrested by the distinct sound of pain-racked groaning. Then the brute of a dog detected my approach and with a furious leaping that almost hung him with his own rope set up a vicious barking. Suddenly the black head of an Indian, or trapper, popped through the tent flaps and a voice shouted in perfect English—"Go away! Go away! The pest! The pest!"

"Who has smallpox?" I bawled back.

"A trader, a Nor'-Wester," said he. "If you have anything for him lay it on the snow and I'll come for it."

As honor pledged me to serve Hamilton until he found his wife, I was not particularly anxious to exchange civilities at close range with a man from a smallpox tent; so I quickly retraced my way to the gorge and hurried homeward with The Mute. My old school-fellow's sudden change towards me when he received the letter written on Citadel paper, and the big squaw's suspicion of my every movement, now came back to me with a significance I had not felt when I was at the camp. Either intuitions like those of my habitant guide, which instinctively put out feelers with the caution of an insect's antennæ for the presence of vague, unknown evil, lay dormant in my own nature and had been aroused by the incidents at the camp, or else the mind, by the mere fact of holding information in solution, widens its own knowledge. For now, in addition to the letter from the Citadel and the squaw's animosity, came the one missing factor—Adderly. I felt, rather than knew, that Louis Laplante had deceived me. Had he lied? A lie is the clumsy invention of the novice. An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything so grossly and tangibly honest as a lie; and Louis was an expert. Though I had not a vestige of proof, I could have sworn that Adderly and the squaw and Louis were leagued against me for some dark purpose. I was indeed learning the first lessons of the trapper's life: never to open my lips on my own affairs to another man, and never to believe another man when he opened his lips to me.

CHAPTER IV

LAUNCHED INTO THE UNKNOWN

"You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off," ejaculated Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with ferocious emphasis. I had been relating my experience with the campers; and was recounting how the man put his head out of the tent and warned me of smallpox. But my uncle was a gentleman of the old school and had a fine contempt for quarantine.

"Knocked his head off, knocked his head off, Sir," he continued, explosively. "Make it a point to knock the head off anything that stands in your way, Sir——"

"But you don't suppose," I expostulated, about to voice my own suspicions.

"Suppose!" he roared out. "I make it a point never to suppose anything. I act on facts, Sir! You wanted to go into that wigwam; didn't you? Well then, why the deuce didn't you go, and knock the head off anything that opposed you?"

Being highly successful in all his own dealings, Mr. Jack MacKenzie could not tolerate failure in other people. A month of vigilant searching had yielded not the slightest inkling of Miriam and the child; and this fact ignited all the gunpowder of my uncle's fiery temperament. We had felt so sure Le Grand Diable's band of vagabonds would hang about till the brigades of the North-West Company's tripmen set out for the north, all our efforts were spent in a vain search for some trace of the rascals in the vicinity of Quebec. His gypsy nondescripts would hardly dare to keep the things taken from Miriam and the child. These would be traded to other tribes; so day and night, Mr. MacKenzie, Eric and I, with hired spies, dogged the footsteps of trappers, who were awaiting the breaking up of the ice; shadowed voyageurs, who passed idle days in the dram-shops of Lower Town, and scrutinized every native who crossed our path, ever on the alert for a glimpse of Diable, or his associates. Diligently we tracked all Indian trails through Charlesbourg forest and examined every wigwam within a week's march of the city. Le Grand Diable was not likely to be among his ancestral enemies at Lorette, but his half-breed followers might have traded with the Hurons; and the lodges at Lorette were also searched. Watches were set along the St. Lawrence, so no one could approach an opening before the ice broke up, or launch a canoe after the water had cleared, without our knowledge. But Le Grand Diable and his band had vanished as mysteriously as Miriam. It was as impossible to learn where the Iroquois had gone as to follow the wind. His disappearance was altogether as unaccountable as the lost woman's, and this, of itself, confirmed our suspicions. Had he sold, or slain his captives, he would not have remained in hiding; and the very fruitlessness of the search redoubled our zeal.

The conviction that Louis Laplante had, somehow or other, played me false, stuck in my mind like the depression of a bad dream. Again and again, I related the circumstances to my uncle; but he "pished," and "tushed," and "pooh-poohed," the very idea of any kidnappers remaining so near the city and giving me free run of their wigwams. My reasonless persistence was beginning to irritate him. Indeed, on one occasion, he informed me that I had as many vagaries in my head as a "bed-ridden hag," and with great fervor he "wished to the Lord there was a law in this land for the ham-stringing of such fool idiots, as that habitant Mute, who led me such a wild-goose chase."

In spite of this and many other jeremiades, I once more donned snow-shoes and with Paul for guide paid a second visit to the campers of the gorge. And a second time, I was welcomed by Louis and taken through the wigwams. The smallpox tent was no longer on the crest of the hill; and when I asked after the patient, Louis without a word pointed solemnly to a snow-mound, where the man lay buried. But I did not see the big squaw, nor the face that had emerged from the tent flaps to wave me off; and when I also inquired after these, Louis' face darkened. He told me bluntly I was asking too many questions and began to swear in a mongrel jargon of French and English that my conduct was an insult he would take from no man. But Louis was ever short of temper. I remembered that of old. Presently his little flare-up died down, and he told me that the woman and her husband had gone north through the woods to join some crews on the Upper Ottawa. From the talk of the others, I gathered that, having disposed of their hunt to the commissariat department at the Citadel, they intended to follow the same trail within a few days. I tried without questioning to learn what crews they were to join; but whether with purpose, or by chance, the conversation drifted from my lead and I had to return to the city without satisfaction on that point.

Meanwhile, Hamilton rested neither night nor day. In the morning with a few hurried words he would outline the plan for the day. At night he rode back to the Chateau with such eager questioning in his eyes when they met mine, I knew he had nothing better to report to me, than I to him. After a silent meal, he would ride through the dark forest on a fresh mount. How and where he passed those sleepless nights, I do not know. Thus had a month slipped away; and we had done everything and accomplished nothing. Baffled, I had gone to confer with Mr. Jack MacKenzie and had, as usual, exasperated him with the reiterated conviction that Adderly and the Citadel writing paper and Louis Laplante had some connection with the malign influence that was balking our efforts.

"Fudge!" exclaims my uncle, stamping about his study and puffing with indignation. "You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off!"

"You've said that several times already, Mr. MacKenzie," I put in, having a touch of his own peppery temper from my mother's side. "What about Adderly's rage?"

"Adderly's been in Montreal since the night of the row. For the Lord's sake, boy, do you expect to find the woman by believing in that bloated bugaboo?"

"But the Citadel paper?" I persisted.

"Of course you've never been told, Rufus Gillespie," he began, choking down his impatience with the magnitude of my stupidity, "that the commissariat buys supplies from hunters?"

"That doesn't explain the big squaw's suspicions and Louis' own conduct."

"That Louis!" says my uncle. "Pah! That son of an inflated old seigneur! A fig for the buck! Not enough brains in his pate to fill a peanut!"

"But there might be enough evil in his heart to wreck a life," and that was the first argument to pierce my uncle's scepticism. The keen eyes glanced out at me as if there might be some hope for my intelligence, and he took several turns about the room.

"Hm! If you're of that mind, you'd better go out and excavate the smallpox," was his sententious conclusion. "And if it's a hoax, you'd better——" and he puckered his brows in thought.

"What?" I asked eagerly.

"Join the traders' crews and track the villains west," he answered with the promptitude of one who decides quickly and without vacillation. "O Lord! If I were only young! But to think of a man too stout and old to buckle on his own snow-shoes hankering for that life again!" And my uncle heaved a deep sigh.

Now, no one, who has not lived the wild, free life of the northern trader, can understand the strange fascinations which for the moment eclipsed in this courteous and chivalrous old gentleman's mind all thought of the poor woman, with whom my own fate was interwoven. But I, who have lived in the lonely fastnesses of the splendid freedom, know full well what surging recollections of danger and daring, of success and defeat, of action in which one faces and laughs at death, and calm in which one sounds the unutterable depths of very infinity—thronged the old trader's soul. Indeed, when he spoke, it was as if the sentence of my own life had been pronounced; and my whole being rose up to salute destiny. I take it, there is in every one some secret and cherished desire for a chosen vocation to which each looks forward with hope up to the meridian of life, and to which many look back with regret after the meridian. Of prophetic instincts and intuitions and impressions and feelings and much more of the same kind going under a different name, I say nothing, I only set down as a fact, to be explained how it may, that all the way out to the gorge, with Paul, The Mute leading for a third time, I could have sworn there would be no corpse in that snow-covered grave. For was it not written in my inner consciousness that destiny had appointed me to the wild, free life of the north? So I was not surprised when Paul Larocque's spade struck sharply on a box. Indians sleep their last sleep in the skins of the chase. Nor was I in the least amazed when that same spade pried up the lid of cached provisions instead of a coffin. Then I had ocular proof of what I knew before, that Louis in word and conduct—but chiefly in conduct, which is the way of the expert had—lied outrageously to me.

When the ice broke up at the end of April, hunters were off for their summer retreats and voyageurs set out on the annual trip to the Pays d'En Haut. This year the Hudson's Bay Company had organized a strong fleet of canoemen under Mr. Colin Robertson, a former Nor'-Wester, to proceed to Red River settlement by way of the Ottawa and the Sault instead of entering the fur preserve by the usual route of Hudson Bay and York Factory. From Le Grand Diable's former association with the North-West Company it was probable he would be in Robertson's brigade. Among the voyageurs of both companies there was not a more expert canoeman than this treacherous, thievish Iroquois. As steersman, he could take a crew safely through knife-edge rocks with the swift certainty of arrow flight. In spite of a reputation for embodying the vices of white man and red—which gave him his unsavory title—it seemed unlikely that the Hudson's Bay Company, now in the thick of an aggressive campaign against its great rival, and about to despatch an important flotilla from Montreal to Athabasca by way of the Nor'-Westers' route, would dispense with the services of this dexterous voyageur. On the other hand, the Nor'-Westers might bribe the Iroquois to stay with them.

Acting on these alternative possibilities, Hamilton and I determined to track the fugitives north. We could leave hirelings to shadow the movements of Indian bands about Quebec. Eric could re-engage with the Hudson's Bay and get passage north with Colin Robertson's brigade, which was to leave Lachine in a few weeks. My uncle had been a famous Bourgeois of the great North-West Company in his younger days, and could secure me an immediate commission in the North-West Company. Thus we could accompany the voyageurs and runners of both companies.

Hamilton's arrangements were easily made; and my uncle not only obtained the commission for me, but, with a hearty clap on my back and a "Bravo, boy! I knew the fur trader's fever would break out in you yet!" pinned to the breast of my inner waistcoat the showy gold medallion which the Bourgeois wore on festive occasions. In very truth I oft had need of its inspiriting motto: Fortitude in Distress.

Feudal lords of the middle ages never waged more ruthless war on each other than the two great fur trading companies of the north at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Pierre de Raddison and Grosselier, gentlemen adventurers of New France, first followed the waters of the Outawa (Ottawa) northward, and passed from Lake Superior (the kelche gamme of Indian lore) to the great unknown fur preserve between Hudson Bay and the Pacific Ocean; but the fur monopolists of the French court in Quebec jealously obstructed the explorers' efforts to open up the vast territory. De Raddison was compelled to carry his project to the English court, and the English court, with a liberality not unusual in those days, promptly deeded over the whole domain, the extent, locality and wealth of which there was utter ignorance, to a fur trading organization,—the newly formed "Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay," incorporated in 1670 with Prince Rupert named as first governor. If monopolists of New France, through envy, sacrificed Quebec's first claim to the unknown land, Frontenac made haste to repair the loss. Father Albanel, a Jesuit, and other missionaries led the way westward to the Pays d'En Haut. De Raddison twice changed his allegiance, and when Quebec fell into the hands of the British nearly a century later, the French traders were as active in the northern fur preserve as their great rivals, the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company; but the Englishmen kept near the bay and the Frenchmen with their coureurs-des-bois pushed westward along the chain of water-ays leading from Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg to the Saskatchewan and Athabasca. Then came the Conquest, with the downfall of French trade in the north country. But there remained the coureurs-des-bois, or wood-rangers, the Metis, or French half-breeds, the Bois-Brulés, or plain runners—so called, it is supposed, from the trapper's custom of blazing his path through the forest. And on the ruins of French barter grew up a thriving English trade, organized for the most part by enterprising citizens of Quebec and Montreal, and absorbing within itself all the cast-off servants of the old French companies. Such was the origin of the X. Y. and North-West Companies towards the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of these the most energetic and powerful—and therefore the most to be feared by the Ancient and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company—was the North-West Company, "Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest," as the partners designated themselves.

From the time that the North-Westers gratuitously poured their secrets into the ears of Lord Selkirk, and Lord Selkirk shrewdly got control of the Hudson's Bay Company and began to infuse Nor'-Westers' zeal into the stagnant workings of the older company, there arose such a feud among these lords of the north as may be likened only to the pillaging of robber barons in the middle ages. And this feud was at its height when I cast in my lot with the North-West Fur Company, Nor'-Westers had reaped a harvest of profits by leaving the beaten track of trade and pushing boldly northward into the remote MacKenzie River region. This year the Hudson's Bay had determined to enter the same area and employed a former Nor'-Wester, Mr. Colin Robertson, to conduct a flotilla of canoes from Lachine, Montreal, by way of the Nor'-Westers' route up the Ottawa to the Saskatchewan and Athabasca. But while the Hudson's Bay Company could ship their peltries directly to England from the bay, the Nor'-Westers labored under the disadvantage of many delays and trans-shipments before their goods reached seaboard at Montreal. Indeed, I have heard my uncle tell of orders which he sent from the north to England in October. The things ordered in October would be sent from London in March to reach Montreal in mid-summer. There they would be re-packed in small quantities for portaging and despatched from Montreal with the Nor'-Western voyageurs the following May, and if destined for the far north would not reach the end of their long trip until October—two years from the time of the order. Yet, under such conditions had the Nor'-Westers increased in prosperity, while the Hudson's Bay, with its annual ships at York Factory and Churchill, declined.

When Lord Selkirk took hold of the Hudson's Bay there was a change. Once a feud has begun, I know very well it is impossible to apportion the blame each side deserves. Whether Selkirk timed his acts of aggression during the American war of 1812-1814, when the route of the Nor'-Westers was rendered unsafe—who can say? Whether he brought colonists into the very heart of the disputed territory for the sake of the colonists, or to be drilled into an army of defense for The Hudson's Bay Company—who can say? Whether he induced his company to grant him a vast area of land at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers—against which a minority of stockholders protested—for the sake of these same colonists, or to hold a strategical point past which North-Westers' cargoes must go—who can say? On these subjects, which have been so hotly discussed both inside and outside law courts, without any definite decision that I have ever heard, I refuse to pass judgment. I can but relate events as I saw them and leave to each the right of a personal decision.

In 1815, Nor'-Westers' canoes were to leave Ste. Anne de Beaupré, twenty miles east of Quebec, instead of Ste. Anne on the Ottawa, the usual point of departure. We had not our full complement of men. Some of the Indians and half-breeds had gone northwest overland through the bush to a point on the Ottawa River north of Chaudière Falls, where they were awaiting us, and Hamilton, through the courtesy of my uncle, was able to come with us in our boats as far as Lachine.

I was never a grasping trader, but I provided myself before setting out with every worthless gew-gaw and flashy trifle that could tempt the native to betray Indian secrets. Lest these should fail, I added to my stock a dozen as fine new flint-locks as could corrupt the soul of an Indian, and without consideration for the enemy's scalp also equipped myself with a box of wicked-looking hunting-knives. These things I placed in square cases and sat upon them when we were in barges, or pillowed my head upon them at night, never losing sight of them except on long portages where Indians conveyed our cargo on their backs.

A man on a less venturesome quest than mine could hardly have set out with the brigades of canoemen for the north country and not have been thrilled like a lad on first escape from school's leading strings. There we were, twenty craft strong, with clerks, traders, one steersman and eight willowy, copper-skin paddlers in each long birch canoe. No oriental prince could be more gorgeously appareled than these gay voyageurs. Flaunting red handkerchiefs banded their foreheads and held back the lank, black hair. Buckskin smocks, fringed with leather down the sleeves and beaded lavishly in bright colors, were drawn tight at the waist by sashes of flaming crimson, green and blue. In addition to the fringe of leather down the trouser seams, some in our company had little bells fastened from knee to ankle. It was a strange sight to see each of these reckless denizens of forest and plain pause reverently before the chapel of La Bonne Sainte Anne, cross himself, invoke her protection on the voyage and drop some offering in the treasury box before hurrying to his place in the canoe. One Indian left the miniature of a carved boat in the hands of the priest at the porch. It was his votive gift to the saint and may be seen there to this day.

As we were embarking I noticed Eric had not come down and the canoes were already gliding about the wharf awaiting the head steersman's signal. I had last seen him on the church steps and ran back from the river to learn the cause of his delay. Now Hamilton is not a Catholic; neither is he a Protestant; but I would not have good people ascribe his misfortunes to this lack of creed, for a trader in the far north loses denominational distinctions and a better man I have never known. What, then, was my surprise to meet him face to face coming out of the chapel with tears coursing down his cheeks and floor-dust thick upon his knees? Women know what to do and say in such a case. A man must be dumb, or blunder; so I could but link my arm through his and lead him silently down to my own canoe.

A single wave of the chief steersman's hand, and out swept the paddles in a perfect harmony of motion. Then someone struck up a voyageurs' ballad and the canoemen unconsciously kept time with the beat of the song. The valley seemed filled with the voices of those deep-chested, strong singers, and the chimes of Ste. Anne clashed out a last sweet farewell.

"Cheer up, old man!" said I to Eric, who was sitting with face buried in his hands. "Cheer up! Do you hear the bells? It's a God-speed for you!"

CHAPTER V

CIVILIZATION'S VENEER RUBS OFF

My uncle accompanied our flotilla as far as Lachine and occupied a place in my division of canoes. Many were the admonitions he launched out like thunderbolts whenever his craft and mine chanced to glide abreast.

"If you lay hands on that skunk," he had said, the malodorous epithet being his designation for Louis Laplante, "If you lay hands on that skunk, don't be a simpleton. Skin him, Sir, by the Lord, skin him! Let him play the ostrich act! Keep your own counsel and work him for all you're worth! Let him play his deceitful game! By Jove! Give the villain rope enough to hang himself! Gain your end! Afterwards forget and forgive if you like; but, by the Lord, remember and don't ignore the fact, that repentance can't turn a skunk into an innocent, pussy cat!"

And so Mr. Jack MacKenzie continued to warn me all the way from Quebec to Montreal, mixing his metaphors as topers mix drinks. But I had long since learned not to remonstrate against these outbursts of explosive eloquence—not though all the canons of Laval literati should be outraged. "What, Sir?" he had roared out when I, in full conceit of new knowledge, had audaciously ventured to pull him up, once in my student days. "What, Sir? Don't talk to me of your book-fangled balderdash! Is language for the use of man, or man for the use of language?" and he quoted from Hamlet's soliloquy in a way that set me packing my pedant lore in the unused lumber-room of brain lobes. And so, I say, Mr. Jack MacKenzie continued to pour instructions into my ear for the venturesome life on which I had entered. "The lad's a fool, only a fool," he said, still harping on Louis, "and mind you answer the fool according to his folly!"

"Most men are fools first, and then knaves, knaves because they have been fools," I returned to my uncle, "and I fancy Laplante has graduated from the fool stage by this time, and is a full diploma knave!"

"That's all true," he retorted, "but don't you forget there's always fool enough left in the knave to give you your opportunity, if you're not a fool. Joint in the armor, lad! Use your cutlass there."

Apart from the peppery discourses of my kinsman, I remember very little of the trip up the St. Lawrence from Ste. Anne to Lachine with Eric sitting dazed and silent opposite me. We, of course, followed the river channel between the Island of Orleans and the north shore; and whenever our boats drew near the mainland, came whiffs of crisp, frosty air from the dank ravines, where snow patches yet lay in the shadow. Then the fleet would sidle towards the island and there would be the fresh, spring odor of damp, uncovered mold, with a vague suggestiveness of violets and May-flowers and ferns bursting with a rush through the black clods. The purple folds of the mountains, with their wavy outlines fading in the haze of distance, lay on the north as they lie to-day; and everywhere on the hills were the white cots of habitant hamlets with chapel spires pointing above tree-tops. At the western end of the island, where boats sheer out into mid-current, came the dull, heavy roar of the cataract and above the north shore rose great, billowy clouds of foam. With a sweep of our paddles, we were opposite a cleft in the vertical rock and saw the shimmering, fleecy waters of Montmorency leap over the dizzy precipice churning up from their own whirling depths and bound out to the river like a panther after prey.

Now the Isle of Orleans was vanishing on our rear and the bold heights of Point Levis had loomed up to the fore; and now we had poked our prows to the right and the sluggish, muddy tide of the St. Charles lapped our canoes, while a forest of masts and yard-arms and flapping sails arose from the harbor of Quebec City. The great walls of modern Quebec did not then exist; but the rude fortifications, that sloped down from the lofty Citadel on Cape Diamond and engirt the whole city on the hillside, seemed imposing enough to us in those days.

It was late in the afternoon when we passed. The sunlight struck across the St. Charles, brightening the dull, gray stone of walls and cathedrals and convents, turning every window on the west to fire and transforming a multitude of towers and turrets and minarets to glittering gold. Small wonder, indeed, that all our rough tripmen stopped paddling and with eyes on the spire of Notre Dame des Victoires muttered prayers for a prosperous voyage. For some reason or other, I found my own hat off. So was Mr. Jack MacKenzie's, so was Eric Hamilton's. Then the voyageurs fell to work again. The canoes spread out. We rounded Cape Diamond and the lengthening shadow of the high peak darkened the river before us. Always the broad St. Lawrence seemed to be winding from headland to headland among the purple hills, in sunlight a mirror between shadowy, forest banks, at night, molten silver in the moon-track. Afternoon slipped into night and night to morning, and each hour of daylight presented some new panorama of forests and hills and torrents. Here the river widened into a lake. There the lake narrowed to rapids; and so we came to Lachine—La Chine, named in ridicule of the gallant explorer, La Salle, who thought these vast waterways would surely lead him to China.

At Lachine, Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with much brusque bluster to conceal his longings for the life he was too old to follow and many cynical injunctions about "skinning the skunk" and "knocking the head off anything that stood in my way" and "always profiting from the follies of other men"—"mind, have none yourself,"—parted from us. Here, too, Eric gripped my hand a tense, wordless farewell and left our party for the Hudson's Bay brigade under Colin Robertson.

It has always been a mystery to me why our rivals sent that brigade to Athabasca by way of Lachine instead of Hudson Bay, which would have been two thousand miles nearer. We Nor'-Westers went all the way to and from Montreal, solely because that was our only point of access to the sea; but the Hudson's Bay people had their own Hudson Bay for a starting place. Why, in their slavish imitation of the methods, which brought us success, they also adopted our disadvantages, I could never understand. Birch canoes and good tripmen could, of course, as the Hudson's Bay men say, be most easily obtained in Quebec; but with a good organizer, the same could have been gathered up two thousand miles nearer York Factory, on Hudson Bay. Indeed, I have often thought the sole purpose of that expedition was to get Nor'-Westers' methods by employing discarded Nor'-Westers as trappers and voyageurs. Colin Robertson, the leader, had himself been a Nor'-Wester; and all the men with him except Eric Hamilton were renegades, "turn-coat traders," as we called them. But I must not be unjust; for neither company could possibly exceed the other in its zeal to entice away old trappers, who would reveal opponents' secrets. Acting on my uncle's advice, I made shift to pick up a few crumbs of valuable information. Had the Hudson's Bay known, I suppose they would have called me a spy. That was the name I gave any of them who might try such tricks with me. The General Assembly of the North-West partners was to meet at Fort William, at the head of Lake Superior. I learned that Robertson's brigade were anxious to slip past our headquarters at Fort William before the meeting and would set out that very day. I also heard they had sent forward a messenger to notify the Hudson's Bay governor at Fort Douglas of their brigade's coming.

Almost before I realized it, we were speeding up the Ottawa, past a second and third and fourth Ste. Anne's; for she is the voyageurs' patron saint and her name dots Canada's map like ink-blots on a boy's copybook. Wherever a Ste. Anne's is now found, there has the voyageur of long ago passed and repassed. In places the surface of the river, gliding to meet us, became oily, almost glassy, as if the wave-current ran too fast to ripple out to the banks. Then little eddies began whirling in the corrugated water and our paddlers with labored breath bent hard to their task. By such signs I learned to know when we were stemming the tide of some raging waterfall, or swift rapid. There would follow quick disembarking, hurried portages over land through a tangle of forest, or up slippery, damp rocks, a noisy launching far above the torrent and swifter progress when the birch canoes touched water again. Such was the tireless pace, which made North-West voyageurs famous. Such was the work the great Bourgeois exacted of their men. A liberal supply of rum, when stoppages were made, and of bread and meat for each meal—better fare than was usually given by the trading companies—did much to encourage the tripmen. Each man was doing his utmost to out-distance the bold rivals following by our route. The Bourgeois were to meet at Fort William early in June. At all hazards we were determined to notify our company of the enemy's invading flotilla; and without margin for accidents we had but a month to cross half a continent.

At nightfall the fourth day from the shrine, after a tiresome nine-mile traverse past the Chaudière Falls of the Ottawa, glittering camp-fires on the river bank ahead showed where a fresh relay of canoemen awaited us. They were immediately taken into the different crews and night-shifts of paddlers put to work. It was quite dark, when the new hands joined us; but in the moonlight, as the chief steersman told off the men by name, I watched each tawny figure step quickly to his place in the canoes, with that gliding Indian motion, which scarcely rocked the light craft. There came to my crew Little Fellow, a short, thick-set man, with a grinning, good-natured face, who—despite his size—would solemnly assure people he was equal in force to the sun. With him was La Robe Noire, of grave aspect and few words, mighty in stature and shoulder power. There were five or six others, whose names in the clangor of voices I did not hear. Of these, one was a tall, lithe, swift-moving man, whose cunning eyes seemed to gleam with the malice of a serpent. This canoeman silently twisted into sleeping posture directly behind me.

The signal was given, and we were in mid-stream again. Wrapping my blanket about me, half propped by a bale of stuff and breathing deep of the clear air with frequent resinous whiffs from the forest I drowsed off. The swish of waters rushing past and the roar of torrents, which I had seen and heard during the day, still sounded in my ears. The sigh of the night-wind through the forest came like the lonely moan of a far-distant sea, and I was sleepily half conscious that cedars, pines and cliffs were engaged in a mad race past the sides of the canoe. A bed in which one may not stretch at random is not comfortable. Certainly my cramped limbs must have caused bad dreams. A dozen times I could have sworn the Indian behind me had turned into a snake and was winding round my chest in tight, smothering coils. Starting up, I would shake the weight off. Once I suddenly opened my eyes to find blanket thrown aside and pistol belt unstrapped. Lying back eased, I was dozing again when I distinctly felt a hand crawl stealthily round the pack on which I was pillowed and steal towards the dagger handle in the loosened belt. I struck at it viciously only to bruise my fist on my dagger. Now wide awake, I turned angrily towards the Indian. Not a muscle of the still figure had changed from the attitude taken when he came into the canoe. The man was not asleep, but reclined in stolid oblivion of my existence. His head was thrown back and the steely, unflinching eyes were fixed on the stars.

"It may not have been you, my scowling sachem," said I to myself, "but snakes have fangs. Henceforth I'll take good care you're not at my back."

I slept no more that night. Next day I asked the fellow his name and he poured out such a jumbled mouthful of quick-spoken, Indian syllables, I was not a whit the wiser. I told him sharply he was to be Tom Jones on my boat, at which he gave an evil leer.

Without stay we still pushed forward. The arrowy pace was merciless to red men and white; but that was the kind of service the great North-West Company always demanded. Some ten miles from the outlet of Lake Nipissangue (Nipissing) foul weather threatened delay. The Bourgeois were for proceeding at any risk; but as the thunder-clouds grew blacker and the wind more violent, the head steersman lost his temper and grounded his canoe on the sands at Point à la Croix. Springing ashore he flung down his pole and refused to go on.

"Sacredie!" he screamed, first pointing to the gathering storm and then to the crosses that marked the fate of other foolhardy voyageurs, "Allez si vous voulez! Pour moi je n'irai pas; ne voyez pas le danger!"

A hurricane of wind, snapping the great oaks as a chopper breaks kindling wood, enforced his words. Canoes were at once beached and tarpaulins drawn over the bales of provisions. The men struggled to hoist a tent; but gusts of wind tossed the canvas above their heads, and before the pegs were driven a great wall of rain-drift drenched every one to the skin. By sundown the storm had gone southeast and we unrighteously consoled ourselves that it would probably disorganize the Hudson's Bay brigade as much as it had ours. Plainly, we were there for the night. Point à la Croix is too dangerous a spot for navigation after dark. With much patience we kindled the soaked underbrush and finally got a pile of logs roaring in the woods and gathered round the fire.

The glare in the sky attracted the lake tribes from their lodges. Indians, half-breeds and shaggy-haired whites—degenerate traders, who had lost all taste for civilization and retired with their native wives after the fashion of the north country—came from the Nipissangue encampments and joined our motley throng. Presently the natives drew off to a fire by themselves, where there would be no white-man's restraint. They had either begged or stolen traders' rum, and after the hard trip from Ste. Anne, were eager for one of their mad boissons—a drinking-bout interspersed with jigs and fights.

Stretched before our camp, I watched the grotesque figures leaping and dancing between the firelight and the dusky woods like forest demons. With the leaves rustling overhead, the water laving the pebbles on the shore, and the washed pine air stimulating one's blood like an intoxicant, I began wondering how many years of solitary life it would take to wear through civilization's veneer and leave one content in the lodges of forest wilds. Gradually I became aware of my sulky canoeman's presence on the other side of the camp-fire. The man had not joined the revels of the other voyageurs but sat on his feet, oriental style, gazing as intently at the flames as if spellbound by some fire-spirit.

"What's wrong with that fellow, anyhow?" I asked a veteran trader, who was taking last pulls at a smoked-out pipe.

"Sick—home-sick," was the laconic reply.

"You'd think he was near enough nature here to feel at home! Where's his tribe?"

"It ain't his tribe he wants," explained the trader.

"What, then?" I inquired.

"His wife, he's mad after her," and the trader took the pipe from his teeth.

"Faugh!" I laughed. "The idea of an Indian sentimental and love-sick for some fat lump of a squaw! Come! Come! Am I to believe that?"

"Don't matter whether you do, or not," returned the trader. "It's a fact. His wife's a Sioux chief's daughter. She went north with a gang of half-breeds and hunters last month; and he's been fractious crazy ever since."

"What's his name?" I called, as my informant vanished behind the tent flaps.

Again that mouthful of Indian syllables, unintelligible and unspeakable for me was tumbled forth. Then I turned to the fantastic figures carousing around the other camp fire. One form, in particular, I seemed to distinguish from the others. He was gathering the Indians in line for some native dance and had an easy, rakish sort of grace, quite different from the serpentine motions of the redskins. By a sudden turn, his profile was thrown against the fire and I saw that he wore a pointed beard. He was no Indian; and like a flash came one of those strange, reasonless intuitions, which precede, or proceed from, the slow motions of the mind. Was this the avant-courier of the Hudson's Bay, delayed, like ourselves, by the storm? I had hardly spelled out my own suspicion, when to the measured beatings of the tom-tom, gradually becoming faster, and with a low, weird, tuneless chant, like the voices of the forest, the Indians began to tread a mazy, winding pace, which my slow eyes could not follow, but which in a strange way brought up memories of snaky convolutions about the naked body of some Egyptian serpent-charmer. The drums beat faster. The suppressed voices were breaking in shrill, wild, exultant strains, and the measured tread had quickened from a walk to a run and from a swaying run to a swift, labyrinthine pace, which has no name in English, and which I can only liken to the wiggling of a green thing under leafy covert. The coiling and circling and winding of the dancers became bewildering, and in the centre, laughing, shouting, tossing up his arms and gesticulating like a maniac, was the white man with the pointed beard. Then the performers broke from their places and gave themselves with utter abandon to the wild impulses of wild natures in a wild world; and there was such a scene of uncurbed, animal hilarity as I never dreamed possible. Savage, furious, almost ferocious like the frisking of a pack of wolves, that at any time may fall upon and destroy a weaker one, the boisterous antics of these children of the forest fascinated me. Filled with the curiosity that lures many a trader to his undoing, I rose and went across to the thronging, shouting, shadowy figures. A man darted out of the woods full tilt against me. 'Twas he of the pointed beard, my suspect of the Hudson's Bay Company. Quick as thought I thrust out my foot and tripped him full length on the ground. The light fell on his upturned face. It was Louis Laplante, that past-master in the art of diplomatic deception. He snarled out something angrily and came to himself in sitting posture. Then he recognized me.

"Mon Dieu!" he muttered beneath his breath, momentarily surprised into a betrayal of astonishment. "You, Gillespie?" he called out, at once regaining himself and assuming his usual nonchalance. "Pardon, my solemncholy! I took you for a tree."

"Granted, your impudence," said I, ignoring the slight but paying him back in kind. I was determined to follow my uncle's advice and play the rascal at his own game. "Help you up?" said I, as pleasantly as I could, extending my hand to give him a lift; and I felt his palm hot and his arm tremble. Then, I knew that Louis was drunk and this was the fool's joint in the knave's armor, on which Mr. Jack MacKenzie bade me use my weapons.

"Tra-la!" he answered with mincing insult. "Tra-la, old tombstone! Good-by, my mausoleum! Au revoir, old death's-head! Adieu, grave skull!" With an absurdly elaborate bow, he reeled back among the dancers.

"Get up, comrade," I urged, rushing into the tent, where the old trader I had questioned about my canoeman was now snoring. "Get up, man," and I shook him. "There's a Hudson's Bay spy!"

"Spy," he shouted, throwing aside the moose-skin coverlet. "Spy! Who?"

"It's Louis Laplante, of Quebec."

"Louis Laplante!" reiterated the trader. "A Frenchman employed by the Hudson's Bay! Laplante, a trapper, with them! The scoundrel!" And he ground out oaths that boded ill for Louis.

"Hold on!" I exclaimed, jerking him back. He was for dashing on Laplante with a cudgel. "He's playing the trapper game with the lake tribes."

"I'll trapper him," vowed the trader. "How do you know he's a spy?"

"I don't know, really know," I began, clumsily conscious that I had no proof for my suspicions, "but it strikes me we'd better not examine this sort of suspect at too long range. If we're wrong, we can let him go."

"Bag him, eh?" queried the trader.

"That's it," I assented.

"He's a hard one to bag."

"But he's drunk."

"Drunk, Oh! Drunk is he?" laughed the man. "He'll be drunker," and the trader began rummaging through bales of stuff with a noise of bottles knocking together. He was humming in a low tone, like a grimalkin purring after a full meal of mice—

"Rum for Indians, when they come,
Rum for the beggars, when they go,
That's the trick my grizzled lads
To catch the cash and snare the foe."

"What's your plan?" I asked with a vague feeling the trader had some shady purpose in mind.

"Squeamish? Eh? You'll get over that, boy. I'll trap your trapper and spy your spy, and Nor'-Wester your H. B. C.! You come down to the sand between the forest and the beach in about an hour and I'll have news for you," and he brushed past me with his arms full of something I could not see in the half-light.

Then, as a trader, began my first compromise with conscience, and the enmity which I thereby aroused afterwards punished me for that night's work. I knew very well my comrade, with the rough-and-ready methods of traders, had gone out to do what was not right; and I hung back in the tent, balancing the end against the means, our deeds against Louis' perfidy, and Nor'-Westers' interests against those of the Hudson's Bay. It is not pleasant to recall what was done between the cedars and the shore. I do not attempt to justify our conduct. Does the physician justify medical experiments on the criminal, or the sacrificial priest the driving of the scape-goat into the wilderness? Suffice it to say, when I went down to the shore, Louis Laplante was sitting in the midst of empty drinking-flasks, and the wily, old Nor'-Wester was tempting the silly boy to take more by drinking his health with fresh bottles. But while Louis Laplante gulped down his rum, becoming drunker and more communicative, the tempter threw glass after glass over his shoulder and remained sober. The Nor'-Wester motioned me to keep behind the Frenchman and I heard his drunken lips mumbling my own name.

"Rufush—prig—stuck-up prig—serve him tam right! Hamilton's—sh—sh—prig too—sho's his wife. Serve 'em all tam right!"

"Ask him where she is," I whispered over his head.

"Where's the gal?" demanded the trader, shoving more liquor over to Louis.

"Shioux squaw—Devil's wife—how you say it in English? Lah Grawnd Deeahble," and he mouthed over our mispronunciation of his own tongue "Joke, isn't it?" he went on. "That wax-face prig—slave to Shioux Squaw. Rufush—a fool. Stuffed him to hish—neck. Made him believe shmall-pox was Hamilton's wife. I mean, Hamilton's wife was shmall-pox. Calf bellowed with fright—ran home—came back—'tamme,' I say, 'there he come again' 'shmall-pox in that grave,' say I. Joke—ain't it?" and he stopped to drain off another pint of rum.

"Biggest joke out of jail," said the Nor'-Wester dryly, with meaning which Louis did not grasp.

"Ask him where she is," I whispered, "quick! He's going to sleep." For Louis wiped his beard on his sleeve and lay back hopelessly drunk.

"Here you, waken up," commanded the Nor'-Wester, kicking him and shaking him roughly. "Where's the gal?"

"Shioux—Pays d'En Haut," drawled the youth. "Take off your boots! Don't wear boots. Pays d'En Haut—moccasins—softer," and he rolled over in a sodden sleep, which defied all our efforts to shake him into consciousness.

"Is that true?" asked the Nor'-Wester, standing above the drunk man and speaking across to me. "Is that true about the Indian kidnapping a woman?"

"True—too terribly true," I whispered back.

"I'd like to boot him into the next world," said the trader, looking down at Louis in a manner that might have alarmed that youth for his safety. "I've bagged H. B. dispatches anyway," he added with satisfaction.

"What'll we do with him?" I asked aimlessly. "If he had anything to do with the stealing of Hamilton's wife——"

"He hadn't," interrupted the trader. "'Twas Diable did that, so Laplante says."

"Then what shall we do with him?"

"Do—with—him," slowly repeated the Nor'-Wester in a low, vibrating voice. "Do—with—him?" and again I felt a vague shudder of apprehension at this silent, uncompromising man's purpose.

The camp fires were dead. Not a sound came from the men in the woods and there was a gray light on the water with a vague stirring of birds through the foliage overhead. Now I would not have any man judge us by the canons of civilization. Under the ancient rule of the fur companies over the wilds of the north, 'twas bullets and blades put the fear of the Lord in evil hearts. As we stooped to gather up the tell-tale flasks, the drunken knave, who had lightly allowed an innocent white woman to go into Indian captivity, lay with bared chest not a hand's length from a knife he had thrown down. Did the Nor'-Wester and I hesitate, and look from the man to the dagger, and from the dagger to the man; or is this an evil dream from a black past? Miriam, the guiltless, was suffering at his hands; should not he, the guilty, suffer at ours? Surely Sisera was not more unmistakably delivered into the power of his enemies by the Lord than this man; and Sisera was discomfited by Barak and Jael. Heber's wife—says the Book—drove a tent nail—through the temples—of the sleeping man—and slew him! Day was when I thought the Old Volume recorded too many deeds of bloodshed in the wilderness for the instruction of our refined generation; but I, too, have since lived in the wilderness and learned that soft speech is not the weapon of strong men overmastering savagery.

I know the trader and I were thinking the same thoughts and reading each other's thoughts; for we stood silent above the drunk man, neither moving, neither uttering a word.

"Well?" I finally questioned in a whisper.

"Well," said he, and he knelt down and picked up the knife. "'Twould serve him right." He was speaking in the low, gentle, purring voice he had used in the tent. "'Twould serve him jolly right," and he knelt over Louis hesitating.

My eyes followed his slow, deliberate motions with horror. Terror seemed to rob me of the power of speech. I felt my blood freeze with the fear of some impending crime. There was the faintest perceptible fluttering of leaves; and we both started up as if we had been assassins, glancing fearfully into the gloom of the forest. All the woods seemed alive with horrified eyes and whisperings.

"Stop!" I gasped, "This is madness, the madness of the murderer. What would you do?" And I was trying to knock the knife out of his hand, when among the shadowy green of the foliage, an open space suddenly resolved itself into a human face and there looked out upon us gleaming eyes like those of a crouching panther.

"Squeamish fool!" muttered the Nor'-Wester, raising his arm.

"Stop!" I implored. "We are watched. See!" and I pointed to the face, that as suddenly vanished into blackness.

We both leaped into the thicket, pistol in hand, to wreak punishment on the interloper. There was only an indistinct sound as of something receding into the darkness.

"Don't fire," said I, "'twill alarm the camp."

At imminent risk to our own lives, we poked sticks through the thicket and felt for our unseen enemy, but found nothing.

"Let's go back and peg him out on the sand, where the Hudson's Bay will see him when they come this way," suggested the Nor'-Wester, referring to Laplante.

"Yes, or hand-cuff him and take him along prisoner," I added, thinking Louis might have more information.

But when we stepped back to the beach, there was no Louis Laplante.

"He was too drunk to go himself," said I, aghast at the certainty, which now came home to me, that we had been watched.

"I wash my hands of the whole affair," declared the trader, in a state of high indignation, and he strode off to his tent, I, following, with uncomfortable reflections trooping into my mind. Compunctions rankled in self-respect. How near we had been to a brutal murder, to crime which makes men shun the perpetrators. Civilization's veneer was rubbing off at an alarming rate. This thought stuck, but for obvious reasons was not pursued. Also I had learned that the worst and best of outlaws easily justify their acts at the time they commit them; but afterwards—afterwards is a different matter, for the thing is past undoing.

I heard the trader snorting out inarticulate disgust as he tumbled into his tent; but I stood above the embers of the camp fire thinking. Again I felt with a creepiness, that set all my flesh quaking, felt, rather than saw, those maddening, tiger eyes of the dark foliage watching me. Looking up, I found my morose canoeman on the other side of the fire, leaning so close to a tree, he was barely visible in the shadows. Thinking himself unseen by me, he wore such an insolent, amused, malicious expression, I knew in an instant, who the interloper had been, and who had carried Louis off. Before I realized that such an act entails life-long enmity with an Indian, I had bounded over the fire and struck him with all my strength full in the face. At that, instead of knifing me as an Indian ordinarily would, he broke into hyena shrieks of laughter. He, who has heard that sound, need hear it only once to have the echo ring forever in his ears; and I have heard it oft and know it well.

"Spy! Sneak!" I muttered, rushing upon him. But he sprang back into the forest and vanished. In dodging me, he let fall his fowling-piece, which went off with a bang into the fire.

"Hulloo! What's wrong out there?" bawled the trader's voice from the tent.

"Nothing—false alarm!" I called reassuringly. Then there caught my eyes what startled me out of all presence of mind. There, reflecting the glare of the firelight was the Indian's fowling-piece, richly mounted in burnished silver and chased in the rare design of Eric Hamilton's family crest. The morose canoeman was Le Grand Diable.

A few hours later, I was in the thick of a confused re-embarking. Le Grand Diable took a place in another boat; and a fresh hand was assigned to my canoe. Of that I was glad; I could sleep sounder and he, safer. The Bourgeois complained that too much rum had been given out.

"Keep a stiffer hand on your men, boy, or they'll ride over your head," one of the chief traders remarked to me.

CHAPTER VI

A GIRDLE OF AGATES RECALLED

To unravel a ball of yarn, with which kittens have been making cobwebs, has always seemed to me a much easier task than to unknot the tangled skein of confused influences, that trip up our feet at every step in life's path. Here was I, who but a month ago had a supreme contempt for guile and a lofty confidence in uprightness and downrightness, transformed into a crafty trader with all the villainous tricks of the bargain-maker at my finger-tips. We had befooled Louis into a betrayal of his associates but how much reliance could be placed on that betrayal? Had he incriminated Diable to save himself? Then, why had Diable rescued his betrayer? Where was Louis in hiding? Was the Sioux wife with her white slave really in the north country, or was she near, and did that explain my morose Iroquois' all-night vigils? We had cheated Laplante; but had he in turn cheated us? Would I be justified in taking Diable prisoner, and would my company consent to the demoralization of their crews by such a step? Ah, if life were only made up of simple right and simple wrong, instead of half rights and half wrongs indistinguishably mingled, we could all be righteous! If the path to the goal of our chosen desire were only as straight as it is narrow, instead of being dark, mysterious and tortuous, how easily could we attain high ends! I was launched on the life for which I had longed, but strange, shadowy forms like the storm-fiends of sailors' lore, drunkenness, deceit and crime—on whose presence I had not counted—flitted about my ship's masthead. And there was not one guiding star, not one redeeming influence, except the utter freedom to be a man. I was learning, what I suppose everyone learns, that there are things which sap success of its sweets.

Such were my thoughts, as our canoes sped across the northern end of Lake Huron, heading for the Sault. The Nor'-Westers had a wonderful way of arousing enthusiastic loyalty among their men. Danger fanned this fealty to white-heat. In the face of powerful opposition, the great company frequently accomplished the impossible. With half as large a staff in the service as its rivals boasted, it invaded the hunting-ground of the Hudson's Bay Company, and outrunning all competition, extended fur posts from the heart of the continent to the foot-hills to the Rockies, and from the international boundary to the Arctic Circle. I had thought no crews could make quicker progress than ours from Lachine to Point à la Croix; but the short delay during the storm occasioned faster work. More voyageurs were engaged from the Nipissangue tribes. As soon as one lot fagged fresh shifts came to the relief. Paddles shot out at the rate of modern piston rods, and the waters whirled back like wave-wash in the wake of a clipper. Except for briefest stoppages, speed was not relaxed across the whole northern end of those inland seas called the Great Lakes. With ample space on the lakes, the brigades could spread out and the canoes separated, not halting long enough to come together again till we reached the Sault. Here, orders were issued for the maintenance of rigid discipline. We camped at a distance from the lodges of local tribes. No grog was given out. Camp-fire conviviality was forbidden, and each man kept with his own crew. We remained in camp but one night; and though I searched every tent, I could not find Le Grand Diable. This worried and puzzled me. All night, I lay awake, stretching conscience with doubtful plans to entrap the knave.

Rising with first dawn-streak, I was surprised to find Little Fellow and La Robe Noire, two of my canoemen, setting off for the woods. They had laid a snare—so they explained—and were going to examine it. Of late I had grown distrustful of all natives. I suspected these two might be planning desertion; so I went with them. The way led through a dense thicket of ferns half the height of a man. Only dim light penetrated the maze of foliage; and I might easily have lost myself, or been decoyed—though these possibilities did not occur to me till we were at least a mile from the beach. Little Fellow was trotting ahead, La Robe Noire jogging behind, and both glided through the brake without disturbing a fern branch, while I—after the manner of my race—crunched flags underfoot and stamped down stalks enough to be tracked by keen-eyed Indians for a week afterwards. Twice I saw Little Fellow pull up abruptly and look warily through the cedars on one side. Once he stooped down and peered among the fern stems. Then he silently signaled back to La Robe Noire, pointed through the undergrowth and ran ahead again without explanation. At first I could see nothing, and regretted being led so far into the woods. I was about to order both Indians back to the tent, when Little Fellow, with face pricked forward and foot raised, as if he feared to set it down—for the fourth time came to a dead stand. Now, I, too, heard a rustle, and saw a vague sinuous movement distinctly running abreast of us among the ferns. For a moment, when we stopped, it ceased, then wiggled forward like beast, or serpent in the underbrush. Little Fellow placed his forefinger on his lips, and we stood noiseless till by the ripple of the green it seemed to scurry away.

"What is it, Little Fellow, a cat?" I asked; but the Indian shook his head dubiously and turned to the open where the trap had been set.

Bending over the snare he uttered an Indian word, that I did not understand, but have since heard traders use, so conclude it was one of those exclamations, alien races learn quickest from one another, but which, nevertheless, are not found in dictionaries. The trap had been rifled of game and completely smashed.

"Wolverine!" muttered the Indian, making a sweep of his dagger blade at an imaginary foe. "No wolverine! Bad Indians!"

Scarcely had he spoken when La Robe Noire leaped into the air like a wounded rabbit. An arrow whizzed past my face and glanced within a hair's-breadth of the Indian's head. Both men were dumb with amazement. Such treachery would have been surprising among the barbarous tribes of the Athabasca. The Sault was the dividing line between Canada and the Wilderness, between the east and the west, and there were no hostiles within a thousand miles of us. Little Fellow would have dragged me pell-mell back to the beach, but I needed no persuasion. La Robe Noire tore ahead with the springs of a hunted lynx. Little Fellow loyally kept between me and a possible pursuer, and we set off at a hard run. That creature, I fancied, was again coursing along beneath the undergrowth; for the foliage bent and rose as we ran. Whether it were man or beast, we were three against one, and could drive it out of hiding.

"See here, Little Fellow!" I cried, "Let's hunt that thing out!" and I wheeled about so sharply the chunky little man crashed forward, knocking me off my feet and sending me a man's length farther on.

That fall saved my life. A flat spear point hissed through the air above my head and stuck fast in the bark of an elm tree. Scrambling up, I promptly let go two or three shots into the fern brake. We scrutinized the underbrush, but there was no sign of human being, except the fern stems broken by my shots. I wrenched the stone spear-head from the tree. It was curiously ornamented with such a multitude of intricate carvings I could not decipher any design. Then I discovered that the medley of colors was produced by inlaying the flint with small bits of a bright stone; and the bright stones had been carved into a rude likeness of some birds.

"What are these birds, Little Fellow?" I asked.

He fingered them closely, and with bulging eyes muttered back, "L'Aigle! L'Aigle!"

"Eagles, are they?" I returned, stupidly missing the possible meaning of his suppressed excitement. "And the stone?"

"Agate, Monsieur."

Agate! Agate! What picture did agate call back to my mind? A big squaw, with malicious eyes and gaping upper lip and girdle of agates, watching Louis Laplante and myself at the encampment in the gorge.

"Little Fellow!" I shouted, not suppressing my excitement. "Who is Le Grand Diable's wife?"

And the Indian answered in a low voice, with a face that showed me he had already penetrated my discovery, "The daughter of L'Aigle, chief of the Sioux."

Then I knew for whom those missiles had been intended and from whom they had come. It was a clever piece of rascality. Had the assassin succeeded, punishment would have fallen on my Indians.

CHAPTER VII

THE LORDS OF THE NORTH IN COUNCIL

Beyond the Sault, the fascinations of the west beckoned like a siren. Vast waterways, where a dozen European kingdoms could be dropped into one lake without raising a sand-bar, seemed to sweep on forever and call with the voice of enchantress to the very ends of the earth. With the purple recesses of the shore on one side and the ocean-expanse of Lake Superior on the other, all the charms of clean, fresh freedom were unveiling themselves to me and my blood began to quicken with that fevered delight, which old lands are pleased to call western enthusiasm. Lake Huron, with its greenish-blue, shallow, placid waters and calm, sloping shores, seemed typical of the even, easy life I had left in the east. How those choppy, blustering, little waves resembled the jealousies and bickerings and bargainings of the east; but when one came to Lake Superior, with its great ocean billows and slumbering, giant rocks and cold, dark, fathomless depths, there was a new life in a hard, rugged, roomy, new world. We hugged close to the north coast; and the numerous rocky islands to our left stood guard like a wall of adamant between us and the heavy surf that flung against the barrier. We were rapidly approaching the headquarters of our company. When south-bound brigades, with prisoners in hand-cuffs, began to meet us, I judged we were near the habitation of man.

"Bad men?" I asked Little Fellow, pointing to the prisoners, as our crews exchanged rousing cheers with the Nor'-Westers now bound for Montreal.

"Non, Monsieur! Not all bad men," and the Indian gave his shoulders an expressive shrug, "Les traitres anglais."

To the French voyageur, English meant the Hudson's Bay people. The answer set me wondering to what pass things had come between the two great companies that they were shipping each other's traders gratuitously out of the country. I recalled the talk at the Quebec Club about Governor McDonell of the Hudson's Bay trying to expel Nor'-Westers and concluded our people could play their own game against the commander of Red River.

We arrived in Fort William at sundown, and a flag was flying above the courtyard.

"Is that in our honor?" I asked a clerk of the party.

"Not much it is," he laughed. "We under-strappers aren't oppressed with honors! It warns the Indians there's no trade one day out of seven."

"Is this Sunday?"

I suddenly recollected as far as we were concerned the past month had been entirely composed of week-days.

"Out of your reckoning already?" asked the clerk with surprise. "Wonder how you'll feel when you've had ten years of it."

Situated on the river bank, near the site of an old French post, Fort William was a typical traders' stronghold. Wooden palisades twenty feet high ran round the whole fort and the inner court enclosed at least two hundred square yards. Heavily built block-houses with guns poking through window slits gave a military air to the trading post. The block-houses were apparently to repel attack from the rear and the face of the fort commanded the river. Stores, halls, warehouses and living apartments for an army of clerks, were banked against the walls, and the main building with its spacious assembly-room stood conspicuous in the centre of the enclosure. As we entered the courtyard, one of the chief traders was perched on a mortar in the gate. The little magnate condescended never a smile of welcome till the Bourgeois came up. Then he fawned loudly over the chiefs and conducted them with noisy ostentation to the main hall. Indians and half-breed voyageurs quickly dispersed among the wigwams outside the pickets, while clerks and traders hurried to the broad-raftered dining-hall. Fatigued from the trip, I took little notice of the vociferous interchange of news in passage-way and over door-steps. I remember, after supper I was strolling about the courtyard, surveying the buildings, when at the door of a sort of barracks where residents of the fort lived, I caught sight of the most grateful object my eye had lighted upon since leaving Quebec. It was a tin basin with a large bar of soap—actual soap. There must still have been some vestige of civilization in my nature, for after a delightful half-hour's intimate acquaintance with that soap, I came round to the groups of men rehabilitated in self-respect.

"Athabasca, Rocky Mountain and Saskatchewan brigades here to-morrow," remarked a boyish looking Nor'-Wester, with a mannish beard on his face. Involuntarily I put my hand to my chin and found a bristling growth there. That was a land where young men could become suddenly very old; and many a trader has discovered other signs of age than a beard on his face when he first looked at a mirror after life in the Pays d'En Haut.

"I say," blurted out another young clerk. "There's a man here from Red River, one of the Selkirk settlers. He's come with word if we'll supply the boats, lots of the colonists are ready to dig out. General Assembly's going to consider that to-morrow."

"Oh! Hang the old Assembly if it ships that man out! He's got a pretty daughter, perfect beauty, and she's here with him!" exclaimed the lad with the mannish beard.

"Go to, thou light-head!" declared the other youth, with the air of an elder in Israel. "Go to! You paraded beneath her window for an hour to-day and she never once laid eyes on you."

All the men laughed.

"Hang it!" said the first speaker. "We don't display our little amours——"

"No," broke in the other, "we just display our little contours and get snubbed, eh?"

The bearded youth flushed at the sally of laughter.

"Hang it!" he answered, pulling fiercely at his moustache. "She is a bit of statuary, so she is, as cold as marble. But there is no law against looking at a pretty bit of statuary, when it frames itself in a window in this wilderness."

To which, every man of the crowd said a hearty amen; and I walked off to stretch myself full length on a bench, resolving to have out a mirror from my packing case and get rid of those bristles that offended my chin. The men began to disperse to their quarters. The tardy twilight of the long summer evenings, peculiar to the far north, was gathering in the courtyard. As the night-wind sighed past, I felt the velvet caress of warm June air on my face and memory reverted to the innocent boyhood days of Laval. How far away those days seemed! Yet it was not so long ago. Surely it is knowledge, not time, that ages one, knowledge, that takes away the trusting innocence resulting from ignorance and gives in its place the distrustful innocence resulting from wisdom. I thought of the temptations that had come to me in the few short weeks I had been adrift, and how feebly I had resisted them. I asked myself if there were not in the moral compass of men, who wander by land, some guiding star, as there is for those who wander over sea. I gazed high above the sloping roofs for some sign of moon, or star. The sky was darkling and overcast; but in lowering my eyes from heaven to earth, I saw what I had missed before—a fair, white face framed in a window above the stoop directly opposite my bench. The face seemed to have a background of gold; for a wonderful mass of wavy hair clustered down from the blue-veined brow to the bit of white throat visible, where a gauzy piece of neck wear had been loosened. Evidently, this was the statuary described by the whiskered youth. But the statuary breathed. A bloom of living apple-blossoms was on the cheeks. The brows were black and arched. The very pose of the head was arch, and in the lips was a suggestion of archery, too,—Cupid's archery, though the upper lip was drawn almost too tight for the bow beneath to discharge the little god's shaft. Why did I do it? I do not know. Ask the young Nor'-Wester, who had worn a path beneath the selfsame window that very day, or the hosts of young men, who are still wearing paths beneath windows to this very day. I coughed and sat bolt upright on the bench with unnecessarily loud intimations of my presence. The fringe of black lashes did not even lift. I rose and with great show of indifference paraded solemnly five times past that window; but, in spite of my pompous indifference, by a sort of side-signalling, I learned that the owner of the heavy lashes was unaware of my existence. Thereupon, I sat down again. It was a bit of statuary and a very pretty bit of statuary. As the youth said, there was no law against looking at a bit of statuary in this wilderness, and as the statuary did not know I was looking at it, I sat back to take my fill of that vision framed in the open window. The statuary, unknown to itself, had full meed of revenge; for it presently brought such a flood of longing to my heart, longings, not for this face, but for what this face represented—the innocence and love and purity of home, that I bowed dejectedly forward with moist eyes gazing at the ground.

"Hullo!" whispered a deep voice in my ear. "Are you mooning after the Little Statue already?"

When I looked up, the man had passed, but the head in the window was leaning out and a pair of swimming, lustrous, gray eyes were gazing forward in a way that made me dizzy. "Ah," they said in a language that needed no speaking, "there are two of us, very, very home-sick."

"The guiding star for my moral compass," said I, under my breath.

Then the statue in a live fashion suddenly drew back into the dark room. The window-shutter flung to, with a bang, and my vision was gone. I left the bench, made a shake-down on one of the store counters, and knew nothing more till the noise of brigades from the far north aroused the fort at an early hour Monday morning. The arrival of the Athabasca traders was the signal for tremendous activity. An army returning from victory could not have been received with greater acclaim. Bourgeois and clerks tumbled promiscuously from every nook in the fort and rushing half-dressed towards the gates shouted welcome to the men, who had come from the outposts of the known world. They were a shaggy, ragged-looking rabble, those traders from mountain fastnesses and the Arctic circle. With long white hair, hatless some of them, with beards like oriental patriarchs, and dressed entirely in skins of the chase, from fringed coats to gorgeous moccasins, the unkempt monarchs of northern realms had the imperious bearing of princes.

"Is it you, really you, looking as old as your great grandfather? By Gad! So it is," came from one quondam friend.

"Powers above!" ejaculated another onlooker, "See that old Father Abraham! It's Tait! As you live, it's Tait! And he only went to the Athabasca ten years ago. He was thirty then, and now he's a hundred!"

"That's Wilson," says another. "Looks thin, doesn't he? Slim fare! He's the only man from Great Slave Lake that escaped being a meal for the Crees,—year of the famine; and they hadn't time to pick his bones!"

A running fire of such comments went along the spectators lining each side of the path. There was a sad side to the clamorous welcomes and handshakes and surprised recognitions. Had not these men gone north young and full of hope, as I was going? Now, news of the feud with the Hudson's Bay brought them out old before their time and more like the natives with whom they had traded than the white race they had left. Here and there, strong men would fall in each other's arms and embrace like school-girls, covering their emotion with rounded oaths instead of terms of endearment.

All day the confusion of unloading boats continued. The dull tread of moccasined feet as Indians carried pack after pack from river bank to the fort, was ceaseless. Faster than the clerks could sort the furs great bundles were heaped on the floor. By noon, warehouses were crammed from basement to attic. Ermine taken in mid-winter, when the fur was spotlessly white, but for the jet tail-tip, otter cut so deftly scarcely a tuft of fur had been wasted along the opened seam, silver fox, which had made the fortune of some lucky hunter—these and other rare furs, that were to minister to the luxury of kings, passed from tawny carriers to sorters. Elsewhere, coarse furs, obtained at greater risk, but owing to the abundance of big game, less valuable for the hunter, were sorted and valued. With a reckless underestimate of the beaver-skin, their unit of currency, Indians hung over counters bartering away the season's hunt. I frankly acknowledge the Company's clerks on such occasions could do a rushing business selling tawdry stuff at fabulous prices.

Meanwhile, in the main hall, the Bourgeois, or partners, of the great North-West Company were holding their annual General Assembly behind closed doors. Clerks lowered their voices when they passed that room, and well they might; for the rulers inside held despotic sway over a domain as large as Europe. And what were they decreeing? Who can tell? The archives of the great fur companies are as jealously guarded as diplomatic documents, and more remarkable for what they omit than what they state. Was the policy, that ended so tragically a year afterwards, adopted at this meeting? Great corporations have a fashion of keeping their mouths and their council doors tight shut and of leaving the public to infer that catastrophes come causeless. However that may be, I know that Duncan Cameron, a fiery Highlander and one of the keenest men in the North-West service, suddenly flung out of the Assembly room with a pleased, determined look on his ruddy face.

"Are ye Rufus Gillespie?" he asked.

"That's my name, Sir."

"Then buckle on y'r armor, lad; for ye'll see the thick of the fight. You're appointed to my department at Red River." And he left us.

"Lucky dog! I envy you! There'll be rare sport between Cameron and McDonell, when the two forts up in Red River begin to talk back to each other," exclaimed a Fort William man to me.

"Are you Gillespie?" asked a low, mellow, musical voice by my side. I turned to face a tall, dark, wiry man, with the swarthy complexion and intensely black eyes of one having strains of native blood. Among the voyageurs, I had become accustomed to the soft-spoken, melodious speech that betrays Indian parentage; and I believe if I were to encounter a descendant of the red race in China, or among the Latin peoples of Southern Europe, I could recognize Indian blood by that rhythmic trick of the native tongue.

"I'm Gillespie," I answered my keen-eyed questioner. "Who are you?"

"Cuthbert Grant, warden of the plains and leader of the Bois-Brulés," was his terse response. "You're coming to our department at Fort Gibraltar, and I want you to give Father Holland a place in your canoes to come north with us. He's on his way to the Missouri."

At that instant Duncan Cameron came up to Grant and muttered something. Both men at once went back to the council hall of the General Assembly. I heard the courtyard gossips vowing that the Hudson's Bay would cease its aggressions, now that Cameron and Cuthbert Grant were to lead the Nor'-Westers; but I made no inquiry. Next to keeping his own counsel and giving credence to no man, the fur trader learns to gain information only with ears and eyes, and to ask no questions. The scurrying turmoil in the fort lasted all day. At dusk, natives were expelled from the stockades and work stopped.

Grand was the foregathering around the supper table of the great dining hall that night. Bourgeois, clerks and traders from afar, explorers, from the four corners of the earth—assembled four hundred strong, buoyant and unrestrained, enthusiastically loyal to the company, and tingling with hilarious fellowship over this, the first reunion for twenty years. Though their manner and clothing be uncouth, men who have passed a lifetime exploring northern wilds have that to say, which is worth hearing. So the feast was prolonged till candles sputtered low and pitch-pine fagots flared out. Indeed, before the gathering broke up, flagons as well as candles had to be renewed. Lanterns swung from the black rafters of the ceiling. Tallow candles stood in solemn rows down the centre of each table, showing that men, not women, had prepared the banquet. Stuck in iron brackets against the walls were pine torches, that had been dipped in some resinous mixture and now flamed brightly with a smell not unlike incense. Tables lined the four walls of the hall and ran in the form of a cross athwart the middle of the room. Backless benches were on both sides of every table. At the end, chairs were placed, the seats of honor for famous Bourgeois. British flags had been draped across windows and colored bunting hung from rafter to rafter.

"Ah, mon! Is no this fine? This is worth living for! This is the company to serve!" Duncan Cameron exclaimed as he sank into one of the chairs at the head of the centre table. The Scotchman's heart softened before those platters of venison and wild fowl, and he almost broke into geniality. "Here, Gillespie, to my right," he called, motioning me to the edge of the bench at his elbow. "Here, Grant, opposite Gillespie! Aye! an' is that you, Father Holland?" he cried to the stout, jovial priest, with shining brow and cheeks wrinkling in laughter, who followed Grant. "There's a place o' honor for men like you, Sir. Here!" and he gave the priest a chair beside himself.

The Bourgeois seated, there was a scramble for the benches. Then the whole company with great zest and much noisy talk fell upon the viands with a will.

"Why, Cameron," began a northern winterer a few places below me, "it's taken me three months fast travelling to come from McKenzie River to Fort William. By Jove! Sir, 'twas cold enough to freeze your words solid as you spoke them, when we left Great Slave Lake. I'll bet if you men were up there now, you'd hear my voice thawing out and yelling get-epp to my huskies, and my huskies yelping back! Used a dog train, whole of March. Tied myself up in bag of buffalo robes at night and made the huskies lie across it to keep me from freezing. Got so hot, every pore in my body was a spouting fountain, and in the morning that moisture would freeze my buckskin stiff. Couldn't stand that; so I tried sleeping with my head out of the bag and froze my nose six nights out of seven."

The unfortunate nose corroborated his evidence.

"Ice was sloppy on the Saskatchewan, and I had to use pack-horses and take the trail. I was trusting to get provisions at Souris. You can imagine, then, how we felt towards the Hudson's Bays when we found they'd plundered our fort. We were without a bite for two days. Why, we took half a dozen Hudson's Bays in our quarters up north last winter, and saved them from starvation; and here we were, starving, that they might plunder and rob. I'm with you, Sir! I'm with you to the hilt against the thieves! There's a time for peace and there's a time for war, and I say this is a very good time for war!"

"Here's confusion to the old H. B. C's! Confusion, short life, no prosperity, and death to the Hudson's Bay!" yelled the young whiskered Nor'-Wester, springing to his feet on the bench and waving a drinking-cup round his head. Some of the youthful clerks were disposed to take their cue from this fire-eater and began strumming the table and applauding; but the Bourgeois frowned on forward conduct.

"Check him, Grant!" growled Cameron in disapproval.

"Sit down, bumptious babe!" said the priest, tugging the lad's coat.

"Here, you young show-off," whispered Grant, leaning across the priest, and he knocked the boy's feet from under him bringing him down to the bench with a thud.

"He needs more outdoor life, that young one! It goes to his head mighty fast," remarked Cameron. "What were you saying about your hard luck?" and he turned to the northern winterer again.

"Call that hard luck?" broke in a mountaineer, laughing as if he considered hardships a joke. "We lived a month last winter on two meals a day; soup, out of snow-shoe thongs, first course; fried skins, second go; teaspoonful shredded fish, by way of an entrée!"

The man wore a beaded buckskin suit, and his mellow intonation of words in the manner of the Indian tongue showed that he had almost lost English speech along with English customs. His recital caused no surprise.

"Been on short, rations myself," returned the northerner. "Don't like it! Isn't safe! Rips a man's nerves to the raw when Indians glare at him with hungry eyes eighteen hours out of the twenty-four."

"What was the matter?" drawled the mountaineer. "Hudson's Bay been tampering with your Indians? Now if you had a good Indian wife as I have, you could defy the beggars to turn trade away——"

"Aye, that's so," agreed the winterer, "I heard of a fellow on the Athabasca who had to marry a squaw before he could get a pair of racquets made; but that wasn't my trouble. Game was scarce."

"Game scarce on MacKenzie River?" A chorus of voices vented their surprise. To the outside world game is always scarce, reported scarce on MacKenzie River and everywhere else by the jealous fur traders; but these deceptions are not kept up among hunters fraternizing at the same banquet board.

"Mighty scarce. Some of the tribe died out from starvation. The Hudson's Bay in our district were in bad plight. We took six of them in—Hadn't heard of the Souris plunder, you may be sure."

"More fools they to go into the Athabasca," declared the mountaineer.

"Bigger fools to send another brigade there this year when they needn't expect help from us," interjected a third trader.

"You don't say they're sending another lot of men to the Athabasca!" exclaimed the winterer.

"Yes I do—under Colin Robertson," affirmed the third man.

"Colin Robertson—the Nor'-Wester?"

"Robertson who used to be a Nor'-Wester! It's Selkirk's work since he got control of the H. B."

"Robertson should know better," said the northerner. "He had experience with us before he resigned. I'll wager he doesn't undertake that sort of venture! Surely it's a yarn!"

"You lose your bet," cried the irrepressible Fort William lad. "A runner came in at six o'clock and reported that the Hudson's Bay brigade from Lachine would pass here before midnight. They're sooners, they are, are the H. B. C's.," and the clerk enjoyed the sensation of rolling a big oath from his boyish lips.

"Eric Hamilton passing within a stone's throw of the fort!" In astonishment I leaned forward to catch every word the Fort William lad might say.

"To Athabasca by our route—past this fort!" Such temerity amazed the winterer beyond coherent expression.

"Good thing for them they're passing in the night," continued the clerk. "The half-breeds are hot about that Souris affair. There'll be a collision yet!" The young fellow's importance increased in proportion to the surprise of the elder men.

"There'll be a collision anyway when Cameron and Grant reach Red River—eh, Cuthbert?" and the mountaineer turned to the dark, sharp-featured warden of the plains. Cuthbert Grant laughed pleasantly.

"Oh, I hope not—for their sakes!" he said, and went on with the story of a buffalo hunt.

The story I missed, for I was deep in my own thoughts. I must see Eric and let him know what I had learned; but how communicate with the Hudson's Bay brigade without bringing suspicion of double dealing on myself? I was turning things over in my mind in a stupid sort of way like one new at intrigue, when I heard a talker, vowing by all that was holy that he had seen the rarest of hunter's rarities—a pure white buffalo. The wonder had appeared in Qu'Appelle Valley.

"I can cap that story, man," cried the portly Irish priest who was to go north in my boat. "I saw a white squaw less than two weeks ago!" He paused for his words to take effect, and I started from my chair as if I had been struck.

"What's wrong, young man?" asked the winterer. "We lonely fellows up north see visions. We leap out of our moccasins at the sound of our own voices; but you young chaps, with all the world around you"—he waved towards the crowded hall as though it were the metropolis of the universe—"shouldn't see ghosts and go jumping mad."

I sat down abashed.

"Yes, a white squaw," repeated the jovial priest. "Sure now, white ladies aren't so many in these regions that I'd be likely to make a mistake."

"There's a difference between squaws and white ladies," persisted the jolly father, all unconscious that he was emphasizing a difference which many of the traders were spelling out in hard years of experience.

"I've seen papooses that were white for a day or two after they were born——"

"Effect of the christening," interrupted the youth, whose head, between flattered vanity and the emptied contents of his drinking cup, was very light indeed.

"Take that idiot out and put him to bed, somebody," commanded Cameron.

"For a day or two after they were born," reiterated the priest; "but I never saw such a white-skinned squaw!"

"Where did you see her?" I inquired in a voice which was not my own.

"On Lake Winnipeg. Coming down two weeks ago we camped near a band of Sioux, and I declare, as I passed a tepee, I saw a woman's face that looked as white as snow. She was sleeping, and the curtain had blown up. Her child was in her arms, and I tell you her bare arms were as white as snow."

"Must have been the effect of the moonlight," explained some one.

"Moonlight didn't give the other Indians that complexion," insisted the priest.

It was my turn to feel my head suddenly turn giddy, though liquor had not passed my lips. This information could have only one meaning. I was close on the track of Miriam, and Eric was near; yet the slightest blunder on my part might ruin all chance of meeting him and rescuing her.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LITTLE STATUE ANIMATE

The men began arguing about the degrees of whiteness in a squaw's skin. Those, married to native women, averred that differences of complexion were purely matters of temperament and compared their dusky wives to Spanish belles. The priest was now talking across the table to Duncan Cameron, advocating a renewal of North-West trade with the Mandanes on the Missouri, whither he was bound on his missionary tour. To venture out of the fort through the Indian encampments, where natives and outlaws were holding high carnival, and my sleepless foe could have a free hand, would be to risk all chance of using the information that had come to me.

I did not fear death—fear of death was left east of the Sault in those days. On my preservation depended Miriam's rescue. Besides, if either Le Grand Diable or myself had to die, I came to the conclusion of other men similarly situated—that my enemy was the one who should go.

Violins, flutes and bag-pipes were striking up in different parts of the hall. Simple ballads, smacking of old delights in an older land, songs, with which home-sick white men comforted themselves in far-off lodges—were roared out in strident tones. Feet were beating time to the rasp of the fiddles. Men rose and danced wild jigs, or deftly executed some intricate Indian step; and uproarious applause greeted every performer. The hall throbbed with confused sounds and the din deadened my thinking faculties. Even now, Eric might be slipping past. In that deafening tumult I could decide nothing, and when I tried to leave the table, all the lights swam dizzily.

"Excuse me, Sir!" I whispered, clutching the priest's elbow. "You're Father Holland and are to go north in my boats. Come out with me for a moment."

Thinking me tipsy, he gave me a droll glance. "'Pon my soul! Strapping fellows like you shouldn't need last rites——"

"Please say nothing! Come quickly!" and I gripped his arm.

"Bless us! It's a touch of the head, or the heart!" and he rose and followed me from the hall.

In the fresh air, dizziness left me. Sitting down on the bench, where I had lain the night before, I told him my perplexing mission. At first, I am sure he was convinced that I was drunk or raving, but my story had the directness of truth. He saw at once how easily he could leave the fort at that late hour without arousing suspicion, and finally offered to come with me to the river bank, where we might intercept Hamilton.

"But we must have a boat, a light cockle-shell thing, so we can dart out whenever the brigade appears," declared the priest, casting about in his mind for means to forward our object.

"The canoes are all locked up. Can't you borrow one from the Indians? Don't you know any of them?" I asked with a sudden sinking of heart.

"And have the whole pack of them sneaking after us? No—no—that won't do. Where are your wits, boy! Arrah! Me hearty, but what was that?"

We both heard the shutter above our heads suddenly thrown open, but darkness hid anyone who might have been listening.

"Hm!" said the priest. "Overheard! Fine conspirators we are! Some eavesdropper!"

"Hush!" and remembering whose window it was, I held him; for he would have stalked away.

"Are you there?" came a clear, gentle voice, that fell from the window in the breaking ripples of a fountain plash.

The bit of statuary had become suddenly animate and was not so marble-cold to mankind as it looked. Thinking we had been taken for an expected lover, I, too, was moving off, when the voice, that sounded like the dropping golden notes of a cremona, called out in tones of vibrating alarm:

"Don't—don't go! Priest! Priest! Father! It's you I'm speaking to. I've heard every word!"

Father Holland and I were too much amazed to do aught but gape from each other to the dark window. We could now see the outlines of a white face there.

"If you'd please put one bench on top of another, and balance a bucket on that, I think I could get down," pleaded the low, thrilling voice.

"An' in the name of the seven wonders of creation, what for would you be getting down?" asked the astonished priest.

"Oh! Hurry! Are you getting the bench?" coaxed the voice.

"Faith an' we're not! And we have no thought of doing such a thing!" began the good man with severity.

"Then, I'll jump," threatened the voice.

"And break your pretty neck," answered the ungallant father with indignation.

There was a rustling of skirts being gathered across the window sill and outlines of a white face gave place to the figure of a frail girl preparing for a leap.

"Don't!" I cried, genuinely alarmed, with a mental vision of shattered statuary on the ground. "Don't! I'm getting the benches," and I piled them up, with a rickety bucket on top. "Wait!" I implored, stepping up on the bottom bench. "Give me your hand," and as I caught her hands, she leaped from the window to the bucket, and the bucket to the ground, with a daintiness, which I thought savored of experience in such escapades.

"What do you mean, young woman?" demanded Father Holland in anger. "I'll have none of your frisky nonsense! Do you know, you baggage, that you are delaying this young man in a matter that is of life-and-death importance? Tell me this instant, what do you want?"

"I want to save that woman, Miriam! You're both so slow and stupid! Come, quick!" and she caught us by the arms. "There's a skiff down among the rushes in the flats. I can guide you to it. Cross the river in it! Oh! Quick! Quick! Some of the Hudson's Bay brigades have already passed!"

"How do you know?" we both demanded as in one breath.

"I'm Frances Sutherland. My father is one of the Selkirk settlers and he had word that they would pass to-night! Oh! Come! Come!"

This girl, the daughter of a man who was playing double to both companies! And her service to me would compel me to be loyal to him! Truly, I was becoming involved in a way that complicated simple duty. But the girl had darted ahead of us, we following by the flutter of the white gown, and she led us out of the courtyard by a sally-port to the rear of a block-house. She paused in the shadow of some shrubbery.

"Get fagots from the Indians to light us across the flats," she whispered to Father Holland. "They'll think nothing of your coming. You're always among them!"

"Mistress Sutherland!" I began, as the priest hurried forward to the Indian camp-fires, "I hate to think of you risking yourself in this way for——"

"Stop thinking, then," she interrupted abruptly in a voice that somehow reminded me of my first vision of statuary.

"I beg your pardon," I blundered on. "Father Holland and I have both forgotten to apologize for our rudeness about helping you down."

"Pray don't apologize," answered the marble voice. Then the girl laughed. "Really you're worse than I thought, when I heard you bungling over a boat. I didn't mind your rudeness. It was funny."

"Oh!" said I, abashed. There are situations in which conversation is impossible.

"I didn't mind your rudeness," she repeated, "and—and—you mustn't mind mine. Homesick people aren't—aren't—responsible, you know. Ah! Here are the torches! Give me one. I thank you—Father Holland—is it not? Please smother them down till we reach the river, or we'll be followed."

She was off in a flash, leading us through a high growth of rushes across the flats. So I was both recognized and remembered from the previous night. The thought was not displeasing. The wind moaned dismally through the reeds. I did not know that I had been glancing nervously behind at every step, with uncomfortable recollections of arrows and spear-heads, till Father Holland exclaimed:

"Why, boy! You're timid! What are you scared of?"

"The devil!" and I spoke truthfully.

"Faith! There's more than yourself runs from His Majesty; but resist the devil and he will flee from you."

"Not the kind of devil that's my enemy," I explained. I told him of the arrow-shot and spear-head, and all mirth left his manner.

"I know him, I know him well. There's no greater scoundrel between Quebec and Athabasca."

"My devil, or yours?"

"Yours, lad. Let your laughter be turned to mourning! Beware of him! I've known more than one murder of his doing. Eh! But he's cunning, so cunning! We can't trip him up with proofs; and his body's as slippery as an eel or we might——"

But a loon flapped up from the rushes, brushing the priest's face with its wings.

"Holy Mary save us!" he ejaculated panting to keep up with our guide. "Faith! I thought 'twas the devil himself!"

"Do you really mean it? Would it be right to get hold of Le Grand Diable?" I asked. Frances Sutherland had slackened her pace and we were all three walking abreast. A dry cane crushed noisily under foot and my head ducked down as if more arrows had hissed past.

"Mane it?" he cried, "mane it? If ye knew all the evil he's done ye'd know whether I mane it." It was his custom when in banter to drop from English to his native brogue like a merry-andrew.

"But, Father Holland, I had him in my power. I struck him, but I didn't kill him, more's the pity!"

"An' who's talking of killin', ye young cut-throat? I say get howld of his body and when ye've got howld of his body, I'd further advise gettin' howld of the butt end of a saplin'——"

"But, Father, he was my canoeman. I had him in my power."

Instantly he squared round throwing the torchlight on my face.

"Had him in your power—knew what he'd done—and—and—didn't?"

"And didn't," said I. "But you almost make me wish I had. What do you take traders for?"

"You're young," said he, "and I take traders for what they are——"

"But I'm a trader and I didn't——" Though a beginner, I wore the airs of a veteran.

"Benedicite!" he cried. "The Lord shall be your avenger! He shall deliver that evil one into the power of the punisher!"

"Benedicite!" he repeated. "May ye keep as clean a conscience in this land as you've brought to it."

"Amen, Father!" said I.

"Here we are," exclaimed Frances Sutherland as we emerged from the reeds to the brink of the river, where a skiff was moored. "Go, be quick! I'll stay here! 'Twill be better without me. The Hudson's Bay are keeping close to the far shore!"

"You can't stay alone," objected Father Holland.

"I shall stay alone, and I've had my way once already to-night."

"But we don't wish to lose one woman in finding another," I protested.

"Go," she commanded with a furious little stamp. "You lose time! Stupids! Do you think I stay here for nothing? We may have been followed and I shall stay here and watch! I'll hide in the rushes! Go!" And there was a second stamp.

That stamp of a foot no larger than a boy's hand cowed two strong men and sent us rowing meekly across the river.

"Did ye ever—did ever ye see such a little termagant, such a persuasive, commanding little queen of a termagant?" asked the priest almost breathless with surprise.

"Queen of courage!" I answered back.

"Queen of hearts, too, I'm thinking. Arrah! Me hearty, to be young!"

She must have smothered her torch, for there was no light among the reeds when I looked back. We crossed the river slowly, listening between oar-strokes for the paddle-dips of approaching canoes. There was no sound but the lashing of water against the pebbled shore and we lay in a little bay ready to dash across the fleet's course, when the boats should come abreast.

We had not long to wait. A canoe nose cautiously rounded the headland coming close to our boat. Instantly I shot our skiff straight across its path and Father Holland waved the torches overhead.

"Hist! Hold back there—have a care!" I called.

"Clear the way!" came an angry order from the dark. "Clear—or we fire!"

"Fire if you dare, you fools!" I retorted, knowing well they would not alarm the fort, and we edged nearer the boat.

"Where's Eric Hamilton?" I demanded.

"A curse on you! None of your business! Get out of the way! Who are you?" growled the voice.

"Answer—quick!" I urged Father Holland, thinking they would respect holy orders; and I succeeded in bumping my craft against their canoe.

"Strike him with your paddle, man!" yelled the steersman, who was beyond reach.

"Give 'im a bullet!" called another.

"For shame, ye saucy divils!" shouted the priest, shaking his torch aloft and displaying his garb. "Shame to ye, threatenin' to shoot a missionary! Ye'd be much better showin' respect to the Church. Whur's Eric Hamilton?" he demanded in a fine show of indignation, and he caught the edge of their craft in his right hand.

"Let go!" and the steersman threateningly raised a pole that shone steel-shod.

"Let go—is ut ye're orderin' me?" thundered the holy man, now in a towering rage, and he flaunted the torch over the crew. "Howld y'r imp'dent tongues!" he shouted, shaking the canoe. "Be civil this minute, or I'll spill ye to the bottom, ye load of cursin' braggarts! Faith an' ut's a durty meal ye'd make for the fush! Foine answers ye give polite questions! How d'y' know we're not here to warn ye about the fort? For shame to ye. Whur's Eric Hamilton, I say?"

Some of the canoemen recognized the priest. Conciliatory whispers passed from man to man.

"Hamilton's far ahead—above the falls now," answered the steersman.

"Then, as ye hope to save your soul," warned Father Holland not yet appeased, "deliver this young man's message!"

"Tell Hamilton," I cried, "that she whom he seeks is held captive by a band of Sioux on Lake Winnipeg and to make haste. Tell him that and he'll reward you well!"

"Vary by one word from the message," added the priest, "and my curses'll track your soul to the furnace."

Father Holland relaxed his grasp, the paddles dipped down and the canoe was lost in the darkness.

More than once I thought that a shadowy thing like an Indian's boat had hung on our rear and the craft seemed to be dogging us back to the flats. Father Holland raised his torch and could see nothing on the water but the glassy reflection of our own forms. He said it was a phantom boat I had seen; and, truly, visions of Le Grande Diable had haunted me so persistently of late, I could scarcely trust my senses. Frances Sutherland's torch suddenly appeared waving above the flats. I put muscle to the oar and before we had landed she called out—

"An Indian's canoe shot past a moment ago. Did you see it?"

"No," returned Father Holland.

"I think we did," said I.

"How can I thank you for what you have done?" I was saying to Frances Sutherland as we entered the fort by the same sally-port.

"Do you really want to know how?"

"Do I?" I was prepared to offer dramatic sacrifice.

"Then never think of it again, nor speak of it again, nor know me any more than if it hadn't happened——"

"The conditions are hard."

"And——"

"And what?" I asked eagerly.

"And help me back the way I came down. For if my father—oh! if my father knew—he would kill me!"

"Faith! So he ought!" ejaculated the priest. "Risking such precious treasure among vandals!"

Again I piled up the benches. From the bench, she stepped to the bucket, and from the bucket to my shoulder, and as the light weight left my shoulder for the window sill, unknown to her, I caught the fluffy skirt, now bedraggled with the night dew, and kissed it gratefully.

"Oh—ho—and oh-ho and oh-ho," hummed the priest. "Do I scent matrimony?"

"Not unless it's in your nose," I returned huffily. "Show me a man of all the hundreds inside, Father Holland, that wouldn't go on his marrow-bones to a woman who risks life and reputation, which is dearer than life, to save another woman!"

"Bless you, me hearty, if he wouldn't, he'd be a villain," said the priest.

CHAPTER IX

DECORATING A BIT OF STATUARY

I frequently passed that window above the stoop next day. Once I saw a face looking down on me with such withering scorn, I wondered if the disgraceful scene with Louis Laplante had become noised about, and I hastened to take my exercise in another part of the courtyard. Thereupon, others paid silent homage to the window, but they likewise soon tired of that parade ground.

Eastern notions of propriety still clung to me. Of this I had immediate proof. When our rough crews were preparing to re-embark for the north, I was shocked beyond measure to see this frail girl come down with her father to travel in our company. Not counting her father, the priest, Duncan Cameron, Cuthbert Grant and myself, there were in our party three-score reckless, uncurbed adventurers, who feared neither God nor man. I thought it strange of a father to expose his daughter to the bold gaze, coarse remarks, and perhaps insults of such men. Before the end of that trip, I was to learn a lesson in western chivalry, which is not easily explained, or forgotten. As father and daughter were waiting to take their places in a boat, a shapeless, flat-footed woman, wearing moccasins—probably the half-breed wife of some trader in the fort—ran to the water's edge with a parcel of dainties, and kissing the girl on both cheeks, wished her a fervent God-speed.

"Oh!" growled the young Nor'-Wester, who had been carried from the banquet hall, and now wore the sour expression that is the aftermath of banquets. "Look at that fat lump of a bumblebee distilling honey from the rose! There are others who would appreciate that sort of thing! This is the wilderness of lost opportunities!"

The girl seated herself in a canoe, where the only men were Duncan Cameron, her father and the native voyageurs; and I dare vouch a score of young traders groaned at the sight of this second lost opportunity.

"Look, Gillespie! Look!" muttered my comrade of the banquet hall. "The Little Statue set up at the prow of yon canoe! I'll wager you do reverence to graven images all the way to Red River!"

"I'll wager we all do," said I.

And we did. To change the metaphor—after the style of Mr. Jack MacKenzie's eloquence—I warrant there was not a young man of the eight crews, who did not regard that marble-cold face at the prow of the leading canoe, as his own particular guiding star. And the white face beneath the broad-brimmed hat, tied down at each side in the fashion of those days, was as serenely unconscious of us as any star of the heavenly constellations. If she saw there were objects behind her canoe, and that the objects were living beings, and the living beings men, she gave no evidence of it. Nor was the Little Statue—as we had got in the habit of calling her—heartless. In spite of the fears which she entertained for her stern father, her filial affection was a thing to turn the lads of the crews quite mad. Scarcely were we ashore at the different encampments before father and daughter would stroll off arm in arm, leaving the whole brigade envious and disconsolate. Was it the influence of this slip of a girl, I wonder, that a curious change came over our crews? The men still swore; but they did it under their breath. Fewer yarns of a quality, which need not be specified, were told; and certain kinds of jokes were no longer greeted with a loud guffaw. Still we all thought ourselves mightily ill-used by that diminutive bundle of independence, and some took to turning the backs of their heads in her direction when she chanced to come their way. One young spark said something about the Little Statue being a prig, which we all invited him to repeat, but he declined. Had she played the coquette under the innocent mask of sympathy and all other guiles with which gentle slayers ambush strong hearts, I dare affirm there would have been trouble enough and to spare. Suicides, fights, insults and worse, I have witnessed when some fool woman with a fair face came among such men. "Fool" woman, I say, rather than "false"; for to my mind falsity in a woman may not be compared to folly for the utter be-deviling of men.

With our guiding star at the prow of the fore canoe, we continued to wind among countless islands, through narrow, rocky channels and along those endless water-ways, that stretch like a tangled, silver chain with emerald jewels, all the way from the Great Lakes to the plains. Somewhere along Rainy River, where there is an oasis of rolling, wooded meadows in a desert of iron rock, we pitched our tents for the night. The evening air was fragrant with the odor of summer's early flowers. I could not but marvel at the almost magical growth in these far northern latitudes. Barely a month had passed since snow enveloped the earth in a winding sheet, and I have heard old residents say that the winter's frost penetrated the ground for a depth of four feet. Yet here we were in a very tropic of growth run riot and the frost, which still lay beneath the upper soil, was thawing and moistening the succulent roots of a wilderness of green. The meadow grass, swaying off to the forest margin in billowy ripples, was already knee-high. The woods were an impenetrable mass of foliage from the forest of ferns about the broad trunks to the high tree-tops, nodding and fanning in the night breeze like coquettish dames in an eastern ball-room. Everywhere—at the river bank, where our tents stood, above the long grass, and in the forest—clear, faint and delicate, like the bloom of a fair woman's cheek, or the pensive theme of some dream fugue, or the sweet notes of some far-off, floating harmonies, was an odor of hidden flowers. A trader's nature is, of necessity, rough in the grain, but it is not corrupt with the fevered joys of the gilded cities. Even we could feel the call of the wilds to come and seek. It was not surprising, therefore, that after supper father and daughter should stroll away from the encampment, arm in arm, as usual. As their figures passed into the woods, the girl broke away from her father's arm and stooped to the ground.

"Pickin' flowers," was the laconic remark of the trader, who had helped me with Louis Laplante on the beach; and the man lay back full length against a rising knoll to drink in the delicious freshness of the night. Every man of us watched the vanishing forms.

"Smell violets?" asked a heterogeneous combination of sun-brown and buckskin.

"This ground's a perfect wheat-field of violets," exclaimed the whiskered youngster.

"Lots o' Mayflowers and night-shades in the bush," declared a ragged man, who was one of the worst gamblers in camp, and was now aimlessly shuffling a greasy, bethumbed pack of cards.

"Oh!" came simultaneously from half a dozen. Personally, it struck me one might pick flowers for a certain purpose in the bush without being observed.

"Mayflowers in June!" scoffed the boy.

"Aye, babe! Mayflowers in June! May is June in these here regions," asserted the man. "Ladies-and-gentlemen, too, many's you could pick in the bush!"

"Ladies-and-gentlemen! Sounds funny in this desert, don't it?" asked the lad. "What are ladies-and-gentlemen?"

"Don't you know?" continued the gambler, unfolding a curious lore of flowers. "Those little potty, white things, split up the middle with a green head on top—grow under ferns. Come on. Cards are ready! Who's going to play?"

"Durn it! Them's Dutchman's breeches!" exclaimed the sun-browned trapper. "O Goll! If that Little Stature finds any Dutchman's breeches, she that's so scared of us men! O Goll! Won't she blush? Say, babe, why don't y'r fill y'r hat with 'em and put 'em in her tent?" and the big trapper set up a hoarse guffaw which led a general chorus. Then the men gathered round, to play.

"Faith, lads!" interrupted the voice of the Irish priest, who had come upon the group so quietly the gambler scarcely had time to tuck the tell-tale cards under his buckskin smock, "I'm thinking ye've all developed a mighty sudden interest in botany. Are there any bleeding hearts in the bush?"

"There may be here," suggested the boy.

"It all comes of the Little Statute!" declared the big trapper.

"Oh! You and your Stature and Statute! Why can't you say Statue?" asked the lad with the pompous scorn of youthful knowledge.

"Because, oh, babe with the chicken-down," answered the man, giving his corrector a thud with his broad palm and sticking heroically by his slip of the tongue, "I says the words I means and don't play no prig. She don't pay more attention to you than if you wuz a stump, that's why she's a statue, ain't it? And the fellows've got to stretch their necks to come up to her ideas of what's proper, that's why she's a stature, ain't it? And not a man of us, if His Reverence'll excuse me for saying so, dare let out a cuss afore her. That's why she's a statute, ain't it?"

And when I walked off to the bush with as great a show of indifference as I could muster, I heard the priest crying "Bravo!" to the man's defence. How came it that I was in the woods slushing through damp mold up to my ankles in black ooze? I no longer had any fear of an ambushed enemy; for Le Grand Diable, the knave, had forfeited his wages and deserted at Fort William. He was not seen after the night of the meeting with the Hudson's Bay canoe off the flats. I drew Father Holland's attention to this, and the priest was no longer so sceptical about that phantom boat. But it was not of these things I thought, as I tore a great strip of bark from the trunk of a birch tree and twisted the piece into a huge cornucopia. Nor had I the slightest expectation of encountering father and daughter in the woods. That marble face was too much in earnest for the vainest of men to suppose its indifference assumed; and no matter how fair the eyes, no man likes to be looked at, by eyes that do not see him, or see him only as a blur on the landscape. Still that marble face stood for much that is dear to the roughest of hearts and about which men do not talk. So I went on packing damp moss into the bottom of the bark horn, arranging frail lilies and night shades about the rim and laying a solid pyramid of violets in the centre. The mold, through which I was floundering, seemed to merge into a bog; but the lower reaches were hidden by a thicket of alder bushes and scrub willows. I mounted a fallen tree and tried to get cautiously down to some tempting lily-pads. Evidently some one else on the other side of the brush was after those same bulbs; for I heard the sucking sound of steps plunging through the mire of water and mud.

"Why, Gillespie," called a voice, "what in the world are you doing here?" and the boy emerged through the willows gaping at me in astonishment.

"Just what I want to know of you," said I.

He presented a comical figure. His socks and moccasins had been tied and slung round his neck. With trousers rolled to his knees, a hatful of water-lilies in one hand and a sheaf of ferns in the other, he was wading through the swamp.

"You see," he began sheepishly. "I thought she couldn't—couldn't conveniently get these for herself, and it would be kind of nice—kind of nice—you know—to get some for her——"

"Don't explain," I blurted out. "I was trying that same racket myself."

"You know, Gillespie," he continued quite confidentially, "when a man's been away from his mother and sisters for years and years and years——"

"Yes, I know, babe; you're an octogenarian," I interrupted.

"And feels himself going utterly to the bow-wows without any stop-gear to keep him from bowling clean to the bottom, a person feels like doing something decent for a girl like the Little Statue," and the youth plucked half a dozen yellow flowers as well as the coveted white ones. "Have some for your basket," said he. His face was puckered into pathetic gravity. "It's so hanged easy to go to the bow-wows out here," he added.

"Not so easy as in the towns," I interjected.

"Ah! but I've been there, gone all through 'em in the towns," he explained. "That's why the pater packed me off to this wilderness."

And that, thought I, is why the west gets all the credit for the wild oats gathered in old lands and sown in the new world. I pulled him up to the log on which I was balanced, and seating himself he dangled his feet down and began to souse the mud off his toes.

"Say!" he exclaimed. "How are you going to get 'em to her?"

"Take them to the tent."

"Well, Gillespie, when you take yours up, take mine along, too, will you? There's a good fellow! Do!" He was drawing on his socks.

"Not much I will. If there's any proxy, you can take mine," I returned.

"Say! Do you think Father Holland would take 'em up?" He had tied his moccasins and was standing.

"Can't say I think he would."

"He'd let you hear about it to all eternity, too, wouldn't he?" reflected the lad. "Come on, then; but you go first." And he followed me up the log, both of us feeling like shame-faced schoolboys. We stole into the tent, the one tent of all others that had interest for us that night, and deposited our burden of flowers on the couch of buffalo robes.

"Hurry," whispered my companion. "Stack these ferns round somewhere! Hurry! She'll be back." And leaving me to do the arranging he bolted for the tent flaps. "Oh! Open earth and swallow me!" he almost screamed, and I heard the sound of two persons coming in violent collision at the entrance.

"The babe, as I live! The rascally young broth of a babe! Ye rogue, ye!" burred the deep bass tones of the trader whom I had met over Louis Laplante. "What are ye doin' here?"

"Oh, is it only you? Thank fortune!" ejaculated the boy, dodging back. "What are you doing yourself? Great guns! You scared the wits out of me! Ho! Here's a lark! Gillespie, my pal, look here!" I turned to see the sheepish, guilty, smirking faces of the trader, the rough-tongued, sunburned trapper and the ragged gambler grouped at the entrance, and each man's arms were full of flowers.

"Well, I'm durned!" began the rough man.

"As she's jack-spotted us all," drawled the gentle, liquid tones of the gambler, "we'd better go ahead and——"

"And decorate a bit of statuary," shouted the lad with a laugh.

It was a long tent, like the booth of a fair, with supports at each end, and we were festooning it from pole to pole with moss and ferns when somebody rasped at the door. "Mon alive! What's goin' on here?" We started from our work with the guilty alacrity of burglars. There stood Frances Sutherland's father, much aghast at the proceedings, and by his side was a face with cheeks flaming poppy red and lips twitching in merriment. There was a sudden snow-storm of flowers being tossed down, and five men brushed past the two spectators and dashed into the hiding of gathering dusk. At the foot of the knoll I ran against the priest.

"That," roared Father Holland, shaking with laughter. "That's what I call good stuff in the rough! Faith, but ye'll give me good stuff in the rough. I want none o' yer gilded chivalry from the tinsel towns!"

There was a wreath of night-shades in the Little Statue's hat when the canoes set out next morning. Mayflowers were at her throat, violets in her girdle and I know not what in a basket at her feet. The face was unconscious of us as ever, but about the downcast eyelids played a tender gentleness which was not there before. Once I caught her glancing back among us as if she would pick out the culprits; and when her eyes for a moment rested on me, my heart set up a silly thumping. But she looked just as pointedly at the others, and I know every man's heart of them responded; for the boy began such a floundering I thought he would spill his canoe. A quick trip brought us to the mouth of Red River, where the Hudson's Bay voyageurs under Colin Robertson were resting. Here I was surprised to learn that Eric Hamilton had not waited but had hastened up Red River to Fort Douglas. I could not but connect this southward move of his with the sudden flight of Le Grand Diable from Fort William.

After brief pause at the foot of Lake Winnipeg, our brigade turned southward and made speed up the Red through the rush-grown sedgy swamps which over-flood the river bed. Farther south the banks towered high and smoke curled up from the huts of Lord Selkirk's settlers. Women with nets in their hands to scare off myriad blackbirds that clouded the air, and men from the cornfields ran to the river edge and cheered us as we passed. Here the Sutherlands landed. Some of the traders thought it a good omen, that Hudson's Bay settlers cheered Nor'-Wester brigades; but in one bend of the muddy Red, the bastions of Fort Douglas, where Governor McDonell of the rival company ruled, loomed up and the guns pointing across the river wore anything but a welcome look.

We passed Fort Douglas unmolested, followed the Red a mile farther to its junction with the Assiniboine and here disembarked at Fort Gibraltar, the headquarters of the Nor'-Westers in Red River.

CHAPTER X

MORE STUDIES IN STATUARY

"So he laughs at our warrant?" exclaimed Duncan Cameron. "Hut-tut! We'll teach him to respect warrants issued under authority of 43^d King George III.," and the dictator of Fort Gibraltar fussed angrily among the papers of his desk and beat a threatening tattoo with knuckles and heels.

The Assiniboine enters the Red at something like a right angle and in this angle was the Nor'-Westers' fort, named after an old-world stronghold, because we imagined our position gave us the same command of the two waterways by which the voyageurs entered and left the north country as Gibraltar has of the Mediterranean. Governor McDonell had thought to outwit us by building the Hudson's Bay fort a mile further down the current of the Red. It was a sharp trick, for Fort Douglas could intercept Nor'-West brigades bound from Montreal to Fort Gibraltar, or from Fort Gibraltar to the Athabasca. Two days after our arrival, Cuthbert Grant, with a band of Bois-Brulés, had gone to Fort Douglas to arrest Captain Miles McDonell for plundering Nor'-West posts. The doughty governor took Grant's warrant as a joke and scornfully turned the whole North-West party out of Fort Douglas. On the stockades outside were proclamations commanding settlers to take up arms in defense of the Hudson's Bay traders and forbidding natives to sell furs to any but our rivals. These things added fuel to the hot anger of the chafing Bois-Brulés. A curious race were these mongrel plain-rangers, with all the savage instincts of the wild beast and few of the brutal impulses of the beastly man. The descendants of French fathers and Indian mothers, they inherited all the quick, fiery daring of the Frenchman, all the endurance, craft and courage of the Indian, and all the indolence of both white man and red. One might cut his enemy's throat and wash his hands in the life blood, or spend years in accomplishing revenge; but it is a question if there is a single instance on record of a Bois-Brulé molesting an enemy's family. When the Frenchman married a native woman, he cast off civilization like an ill-fitting coat and virtually became an Indian. When the Scotch settler married a native woman, he educated her up to his own level and if she did not become entirely civilized, her children did. One was the wild man, the Ishmaelite of the desert, the other, the tiller of the soil, the Israelite of the plain. Such were the tameless men, of whom Cuthbert Grant was the leader, the leader solely from his fitness to lead.

It was late in the afternoon when the warden returned from Fort Douglas. I was busy over my desk. Father Holland was still with us awaiting the departure of traders to the south, and Duncan Cameron was stamping about the room like a caged lion. There came a quick, angry tramp from the hall.

"That's Grant back, and there's no one with him," muttered Cameron with suppressed anger; and in burst the warden himself, his heavy brows dark with fury and his eyes flashing like the fire at a pistol point. Involuntarily I stopped work and the priest glanced across at me with a look which bespoke expectation of an explosion. Grant did not storm. That was not his way. He took several turns about the room, mastered himself, and speaking through his teeth said quietly, "There be some fools that enjoy playing with gunpowder. I'm not one of them! There be some idiots that like teasing tigers. 'Tis not sport to my fancy! There be some pot-valiant braggarts that defy the law. Let them enjoy the breaking of the law!"

"What—what—what?" sputtered the Highland governor, springing first on one side of Grant and then on the other, all the while rumbling out maledictions on Lord Selkirk, and Governor McDonell and Fort Douglas. "What do ye say, mon? Do I understand ye clearly, there's no prisoners with ye?"

"Laughs at the Bois-Brulés. The fool laughs at the Bois-Brulés! I've seen gophers cock their eye at a wolf, before that same wolf made a breakfast of gophers! The fool laughs at your warrant, Sir! Scouted it, Sir! Bundled us out of Fort Douglas like cattle!" The warden went on in a bitter strain to tell of the effect of the posted proclamations on his followers.

"So the lordly Captain Miles McDonell of the Queen's Rangers, generalissimo of all creation, defies us, does he?" demanded Cameron in great dudgeon, scarcely crediting his ears.

"Aye!" answered Grant, "but he can ill afford to be so high and mighty. We went through the settlement and half the people are with us——"

"That's good! That's good!" responded Cameron with keen relish.

"They're heartily sick of the country," continued the warden, "and would leave to-morrow if we'd supply the boats. Last winter they nearly starved. The company's generous supply was rancid grease and wormy flour."

"Fine way o' colonizing a country," stormed Cameron, "bring men out as settlers and arm them to fight! We'll spike his guns by shipping a score more away."

"We've spiked his guns in a better way," said Grant dryly. "Some of the friendlies are so afraid he'll take their guns away and leave them defenceless unless they fight us, they've sent their arms here for safekeeping. We'll keep them safe, I'll warrant." Grant smiled, showing his white teeth in a way that was not pleasant to see, and somehow reminded me of a dog's snarl.

"Good! Good! Excellent, Grant." Such strategy pleased Cameron. "See here, mon, Cuthbert, we've the law on our side—we've the warrants to back the law! We'd better give yon dour fool a lesson. He's broken the peace. We haven't. Come out, an' I'll talk it over with ye!"

The two went out, Grant saying as they passed the window—"Let him tamper with the fur trade among the Indians and I'll not answer for it! That last order not to sell——" The rest of the remark I lost.

"'Twould serve him well right if they did," returned Cameron, and both men walked beyond hearing.

Father Holland and I were left alone. The fort became ominously still. There was a distant clatter of receding hoofs; but we were on the south side of the warehouse and could not see which way the horses were galloping.

"I'm afraid—I'm afraid both sides will be rash," observed the priest.

The sun-dial indicated six o'clock. I closed and locked the office desks. We had supper in the deserted dining-hall. Afterwards we strolled to the northeast gate, and looking in the direction of Fort Douglas, wondered what scheme could be afoot. Here my testimony need not be taken for, or against, either side. All I saw was Duncan Cameron with the other white men of the fort standing on a knoll some distance from Fort Gibraltar, evidently gazing towards Fort Douglas. Against the sky, above the settlement, there were clouds of rising smoke.

"Burning hay-ricks?" I questioned.

"Aye, and houses! 'Tis shameless work leaving the people exposed to the blasts of next winter! Shameless, shameless work! Y'r company'll gain nothing by it, Rufus!"

Across the night came faint, short snappings like a fusillade of shots.

"Looting the neutrals," said the priest. "God grant there be no blood on the plains this night! These fool traders don't realize what it means to rouse blood in an Indian! They'll get a lesson yet! Give the red devils a taste of blood and there won't be a white unscalped to the Rockies! I've seen y'r fine, clever rascals play the Indian against rivals, and the game always ends the same way. The Indian is a weapon that's quick to cut the hand of the user."

Little did I realize my part in the terrible fulfilment of that prophecy.

"Look alive, lad! Where are y'r wits? What's that?" he cried, suddenly pointing to the river bank.

Up from the cliff sprang a form as if by magic. It came leaping straight to the fort gate.

"Some frightened half-breed wench," surmised the priest.

I saw it was a woman with a shawl over her head like a native.

"Bon soir!" said I after the manner of traders with Indian women; but she rushed blindly on to the gate.

The fort was deserted. Suspicion of treachery flashed on me. How many more half-breeds were beneath that cliff?

"Stop, huzzie!" I ordered, springing forward and catching her so tightly by the wrist that she swung half-way round before she could check herself. She wrenched vigorously to get free. "Stop! Be still, you huzzie!"

"Be still—you what?" asked a low, amazed voice that broke in ripples and froze my blood. A shawl fluttered to the ground, and there stood before us the apparition of a marble face.

"The Little Statue!" I gasped in sheer horror at what I had done.

"The little—what?" asked the rippling voice, that sounded like cold water flowing under ice, and a pair of eyes looked angrily down at the hand with which I was still unconsciously gripping her arm.

"I'd thank you, Sir," she began, with a mock courtesy to the priest, "I'd thank you, Sir, to call off your mastiff."

"Let her go, boy!" roared the priest with a hammering blow across my forearm that brought me to my senses and convinced me she was no wraith.

Mastiff! That epithet stung to the quick. I flung her wrist from me as if it had been hot coals. Now, a woman may tread upon a man—also stamp upon him if she has a mind to—but she must trip it daintily. Otherwise even a worm may turn against its tormentor. To have idolized that marble creature by day and night, to have laid our votive offerings on its shrine, to have hungered for the sound of a woman's lips for weeks, and to hear those lips cuttingly call me a dog—were more than I could stand.

"Ten thousand pardons, Mistress Sutherland!" I said with a pompous stiffness which I intended should be mighty crushing. "But when ladies deck themselves out as squaws and climb in and out of windows,"—that was brutal of me; she had done it for Miriam and me—"and announce themselves in unexpected ways, they need not hope to be recognized."

And did she flare back at me? Not at all.

"You waste time with your long speeches," she said, turning from me to Father Holland.

Thereupon I strode off angrily to the river bank.

"Oh, Father Holland," I heard her say as I walked away, "I must go to Pembina! I'm in such trouble! There's a Frenchman——"

Trouble, thought I; she is in trouble and I have been thinking only of my own dignity. And I stood above the river, torn between desire to rush back and wounded pride, that bade me stick it out. Over the plains came the shout of returning plunderers. I could hear the throb, throb of galloping hoofs beating nearer and nearer over the turf, and reflected that I might make the danger from returning Bois-Brulés the occasion of a reconciliation.

"Come here, lad!" called Father Holland. I needed no urging. "Ye must rig up in tam-o'-shanter and tartan, like a Highland settler, and take Mistress Sutherland back to Fort Douglas. She's going to Pembina to meet her father, lad, when I go south to the Missouri. And, lad," the priest hesitated, glancing doubtfully from Miss Sutherland to me, "I'm thinking there's a service ye might do her."

The Little Statue was looking straight at me now, and there were tear-marks about the heavy lashes. Now, I do not pretend to explain the power, or witchery, a gentle slip of a girl can wield with a pair of gray eyes; but when I met the furtive glance and saw the white, veined forehead, the arched brows, the tremulous lips, the rounded chin, and the whole face glorified by that wonderful mass of hair, I only know, without weapon or design, she dealt me a wound which I bear to this day. What a ruffian I had been! I was ashamed, and my eyes fell before hers. If a libation of blushes could appease an offended goddess, I was livid evidence of repentance. I felt myself flooded in a sudden heat of shame. She must have read my confusion, for she turned away her head to hide mantling forgiveness.

"There's a crafty Frenchman in the fort has been troubling the lassie. I'm thinking, if ye worked off some o' your anger on him, it moight be for the young man's edification. Be quick! I hear the breeds returning!"

"But I have a message," she said in choking tones.

"From whom?" I asked aimlessly enough.

"Eric Hamilton!" she answered.

"Eric Hamilton!" both the priest and I shouted.

"Yes—why? What—what—is it? He's wounded, and he wants a Rufus Gillespie, who's with the Nor'-Westers. The Bois-Brulés fired on the fort. Where is Rufus Gillespie?"

"Bless you, lassie! Here—here—here he is!" The holy father thumped my back at every word. "Here he is, crazy as a March hare for news of Hamilton!"

"You—Rufus—Gillespie!" So she did not even know my name. Evidently, if she troubled my thoughts, I did not trouble hers.

"He's told me so much about you," she went on, with a little pant of astonishment. "How brave and good——"

"Pshaw!" I interrupted roughly. "What's the message?"

"Mr. Hamilton wishes to see you at once," she answered coldly.

"Then kill two birds with one stone! Take her home and see Hamilton—and hurry!" urged the priest.

The half-breeds were now very near.

"Put it over your head!" and Father Holland clapped the shawl about Frances Sutherland after the fashion of the half-breed women.

She stood demurely behind him while I ran up-stairs in the warehouse to disguise myself in tartan plaid. When I came out, Duncan Cameron was in the gateway welcoming Cuthbert Grant and the Bois-Brulés, as if pillaging defenceless settlers were heroic. Victors from war may be inspiring, but a half-breed rabble, red-handed from deeds of violence, is not a sight to edify any man.

"What's this ye have, Father?" bawled one impudent fellow, and he pointed sneeringly at the figure in the folds of the shawl.

"Let the wench be!" was the priest's reply, and the half-breed lounged past with a laugh.

I was about to offer Frances Sutherland my arm to escort her from the mob, when I felt Father Holland's hard knuckles dig viciously into my ribs.

"Ye fool ye! Ye blundering idiot!" he whispered, "she's a half-breed. Och! But's time y'r eastern greenness was tannin' a good western russet! Let her follow with bowed head, or you'll have the whole pack on y'r heels!"

With that admonition I strode boldly out, she behind, humble, with downcast eyes like a half-breed girl.

We ran down the river path through the willows and jumping into a canoe swiftly rounded the forks of the Assiniboine and Red. There we left the canoe and fled along a trail beneath the cliff till the shouting of the half-breeds could be no longer heard. At once I turned to offer her my arm. She must have bruised her feet through the thin moccasins, for the way was very rough. I saw that she was trembling from fatigue.

"Permit me," I said, offering my arm as formally as if she had been some grand lady in an eastern drawing-room.

"Thank you—I'm afraid I must," and she reluctantly placed a light hand on my sleeve.

I did not like that condescending compulsion, and now out of danger, I became strangely embarrassed and angry in her presence. The "mastiff" epithet stuck like a barb in my boyish chivalry. Was it the wind, or a low sigh, or a silent weeping, that I heard? I longed to know, but would not turn my head, and my companion was lagging just a step behind. I slackened speed, so did she. Then a voice so low and soft and golden it might have melted a heart of stone—but what is a heart of stone compared to the wounded pride of a young man?—said, "Do you know, I think I rather like mastiffs?"

"Indeed," said I icily, in no mood for raillery.

"Like them for friends, not enemies, to be protected by them, not—not bitten," the voice continued with a provoking emphasis of the plural "them."

"Yes," said I, with equal emphasis of the obnoxious plural. "Ladies find them useful at times."

That fling silenced her and I felt a shiver run down the arm on my sleeve.

"Why, you're shivering," I blundered out. "You must let me put this round you," and I pulled off the plaid and would have placed it on her shoulders, but she resisted.

"I am not in the least cold," she answered frigidly—which is the only untruth I ever heard her tell—"and you shall not say 'must' to me," and she took her hand from my arm. She spoke with a tremor that warned me not to insist. Then I knew why she had shivered.

"Please forgive, Miss Sutherland," I begged. "I'm such a maladroit animal."

"I quite agree with you, a maladroit mastiff with teeth!"

Mastiff! That insult again! I did not reproffer my arm. We strode forward once more, she with her face turned sideways remote from me, I with my face sideways remote from her, and the plaid trailing from my hand by way of showing her she could have it if she wished. We must have paced along in this amiable, post-matrimonial fashion for quite a quarter of the mile we had to go, and I was awkwardly conscious of suppressed laughing from her side. It was the rippling voice, that always seemed to me like fountain splash in the sunshine, which broke silence again.

"Really," said the low, thrilling, musical witchery by my side, "really, it's the most wonderful story I have ever heard!"

"Story?" I queried, stopping stock still and gaping at her.

"Perfectly wonderful! So intensely interesting and delightful."

"Interesting and delightful?" I interrogated in sheer amazement. This girl utterly dumfounded me, and in the conceit of youth I thought it strange that any girl could dumfound me.

"What an interesting life you have had, to be sure!"

"I have had?"

"Yes, don't you know you've been talking in torrents for the past ten minutes? No? Do you forget?" and she laughed tremulously either from embarrassment, or cold.

"Well!" said I, befooled into good-humor and laughing back. "If you give me a day's warning, I'll try to keep up with you."

"Ah! There! I've put you through the ice at last! It's been such hard work!"

"And I come up badly doused!"

"Stimulated too! You're doing well already!"

"My thanks to my instructor," and catching the spirit of her mockery, I swept her a courtly bow.

"There! There!" she cried, dropping raillery as soon as I took it up. "You were cross at the window. I was cross on the flats. You nearly wrenched my hand off——"

"Can you blame me?" I asked. "And to pay me back you turned my head and stole my heart——"

"Hush!" she interrupted. "Let's clean the slate and begin again."

"With all my heart, if you'll wear this tartan and stop shivering." I was not ready to consent to an unconditional surrender.

"I hate your 'ifs' and 'buts' and so-much-given-for-so-much-got," she exclaimed with an impatient, little stamp, "but—but—" she added inconsistently, "if—if—you'll keep one end of the plaid for yourself, I'll take the other."

"Ho—ho! I like 'ifs' and 'buts.' Have you more of that kind?" I laughed, whisking the fold about us both. Drawing her hand into mine, I kept it there.

"It isn't so cold as—as that, is it?" asked the voice under the plaid.

"Quite," I returned valiantly, tightening my clasp. She laughed a low, mellow laugh that set my heart beating to the tune of a trip-hammer. I felt a great intoxication of strength that might have razed Fort Douglas to the ground and conquered the whole world, which, I dare say, other young men have felt when the same kind of weight hung upon their protection.

"Oh! Little Statue! Why have you been so hard on us?" I began.

"Us?" she asked.

"Me—then," and I gulped down my embarrassment.

"Because——"

"Because what?"

"No what. Just because!" She was astonished that her decisive reason did not satisfy.

"Because! A woman's reason!" I scoffed.

"Because! It's the best and wisest and most wholesome reason ever invented. Think what it avoids saying and what wisdom may be behind it!"

"Only wisdom?"

"You be careful! There'll be another cold plunge! Tell me about your friend's wife, Miriam," she answered, changing the subject.

And when I related my strange mission and she murmured, "How noble," I became a very Samson of strength, ready to vanquish an army of Philistine admirers with the jawbone of my inflated self-confidence—provided, always, one queen of the combat were looking on.

"Are you cold, now?" I asked, though the trembling had ceased.

No, she was not cold. She was quite comfortable, and the answer came in vibrant tones which were as wine to a young man's heart.

"Are you tired, Frances?" and the "No" was accompanied by a little laugh, which spurred more questioning for no other purpose than to hear the music of her voice. Now, what was there in those replies to cause happiness? Why have inane answers to inane, timorous questions transformed earth into paradise and mortals into angels?

"Do you find the way very far—Frances?" The flavor of some names tempts repeated tasting.

"Very far?" came the response in an amused voice, "find it very far? Yes I do, quite far—oh! No—I don't. Oh! I don't know!" She broke into a joyous laugh at her own confusion, gaining more self-possession as I lost mine; and out she slipped from the plaid.

"I wish it were a thousand times farther," and I gazed ruefully at the folds that trailed empty.

What other absurd things I might have said, I cannot tell; but we were at the fort and I had to wrap the tartan disguise about myself. Stooping, I picked a bunch of dog-roses growing by the path, then felt foolish, for I had not the courage to give them to her, and dropped them without her knowledge. She gave the password at the gate. I was taken for a Selkirk Highlander and we easily gained entrance.

A man brushed past us in the gloom of the courtyard. He looked impudently down into her face. It was Laplante, and my whole frame filled with a furious resentment which I had not guessed could be possible with me.

"That Frenchman," she whispered, but his figure vanished among the buildings. She showed me the council hall where Eric could be found.

"And where do you go?" I asked stupidly.

She indicated the quarters where the settlers had taken refuge. I led her to the door.

"Are you sure you'll be safe?"

"Oh! Yes, quite, as long as the settlers are here; and you, you will let me know when the priest sets out for Pembina?"

I vowed more emphatically than the case required that she should know.

"Are there no dark halls in there, unsafe for you?" I questioned.

"None," and she went up the first step of the doorway.

"Are you sure you're safe?" I also mounted a step.

"Yes, quite, thank you," and she retreated farther, "and you, have you forgotten you came to see Mr. Hamilton?"

"Why—so I did," I stammered out absently.

She was on the top step, pulling the latch-string of the great door.

"Stop! Frances—dear!" I cried.

She stood motionless and I felt that this last rashness of an unruly tongue—too frank by far—had finished me.

"What? Can I do anything to repay you for your trouble in bringing me here?"

"I've been repaid," I answered, "but indeed, indeed, long live the Queen! May it please Her Majesty to grant a token to her leal and devoted knight——"

"What is thy request?" she asked laughingly. "What token doth the knight covet?"

"The token that goes with good-nights," and I ventured a pace up the stairs.

"There, Sir Knight," she returned, hastily putting out her hand, which was not what I wanted, but to which I gratefully paid my devoir. "Art satisfied?" she asked.

"Till the Queen deigns more," and I paused for a reply.

She lingered on the threshold as if she meant to come down to me, then with a quick turn vanished behind the gloomy doors, taking all the light of my world with her; but I heard a voice, as of some happy bird in springtime, trilling from the hall where she had gone, and a new song made music in my own heart.

CHAPTER XI

A SHUFFLING OF ALLEGIANCE

Time was when Fort Douglas rang as loudly with mirth of assembled traders as ever Fort William's council hall. Often have I heard veterans of the Hudson's Bay service relate how the master of revels used to fill an ample jar with corn and quaff a beaker of liquor for every grain in the drinker's hour-glass.

"How stands the hour-glass?" the governor of the feast, who was frequently also the governor of the company, would roar out in stentorian tones, that made themselves heard above the drunken brawl.

"High, Your Honor, high," some flunkey of the drinking bout would bawl back.

Thereupon, another grain was picked from the jar, another flagon tossed down and the revel went on. This was a usual occurrence before and after the conflict with the Nor'-Westers. But the night that I climbed the stairs of the main warehouse and, mustering up assurance, stepped into the hall as if I belonged to the fort, or the fort belonged to me, there was a different scene. A wounded man lay on a litter at the end of the long, low room; and the traders sitting on the benches against the walls, or standing aimlessly about, were talking in suppressed tones. Scotchmen, driven from their farms by the Bois-Brulés, hung around in anxious groups. The lanterns, suspended on iron hooks from mid-rafter, gave but a dusky light, and I vainly scanned many faces for Eric Hamilton. That he was wounded, I knew. I was stealing stealthily towards the stretcher at the far end of the place, when a deep voice burred rough salutation in my ear.

"Hoo are ye, gillie?" It was a shaggy-browed, bluff Scotchman, who evidently took me in my tartan disguise for a Highland lad. Whether he meant, "How are you," or "Who are you," I was not certain. Afraid my tongue might betray me, I muttered back an indistinct response. The Scot was either suspicious, or offended by my churlishness. I slipped off quickly to a dark corner, but I saw him eying me closely. A youth brushed past humming a ditty, which seemed strangely out of place in those surroundings. He stood an elbow's length from me and kicked moccasined heels against the floor in the way of light-headed lads. Both the air and figure of the young fellow vaguely recalled somebody, but his back was towards me. I was measuring my comrade, wondering if I might inquire where Hamilton could be found, when the lad turned, and I was face to face with the whiskered babe of Fort William. He gave a long, low whistle.

"Gad!" he gasped. "Do my eyes tell lies? As I live, 'tis your very self! Hang it, now, I thought you were one of those solid bodies wouldn't do any turn-coating——"

"Turn-coating!" I repeated in amazement.

"One of those dray-horse, old reliables, wouldn't kick over the traces, not if the boss pumped his arms off licking you! Hang it! I'm not that sort! By gad, I'm not! I've got too many oats! I can't stand being jawed and gee-hawed by Dunc. Cameron; so when the old Gov. threatened to dock me for being full, I just kicked up my heels and came. But say! I didn't think you would, Gillespie!"

"No?" said I, keeping my own counsel and waiting for the Nor'-West deserter to proceed.

"What 'd y' do it for, Gillespie? You're as sober as cold water! Was it old Cameron?"

"You're not talking straight, babe," said I. "You know Cameron doesn't nag his men. What did you do it for?"

"Eh?" and the lad gave a laugh over my challenge of his veracity. "See here, old pal, I'll tell you if you tell me."

"Go ahead with your end of the contract!"

"Well, then, look here. We're not in this wilderness for glory. I knock down to the highest bidder——"

"Hudson's Bay is not the highest bidder."

"Not unless you happen to have information they want."

"Oh! That's the way of it, is it?" So the boy was selling Nor'-Westers' secrets.

"You can bet your last beaver-skin it is! Do you think I was old Cam's private secretary for nothin'? Not I! I say—get your wares as you may and sell 'em to the highest bidder. So here I am, snugly berthed, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs, all through judicious—distribution—of—information." And the boy gurgled with pleasure over his own cleverness. "And say, Gillespie, I'm in regular clover! The Little Statue's here, all alone! Dad's gone to Pembina to the buffalo hunt. I've got ahead of all you fellows. I'm going to introduce a French-chap, a friend of mine."

"You'd much better break his bones," was my advice. It needed no great speculation to guess who the Frenchman was; and in the hands of that crafty rake this prattling babe would be as putty.

"Pah! You're jealous, Gillespie! We're right on the inside track!"

"Lots of confidential talks with her, I suppose?"

"Talks! Pah! You gross fatty! Why, Gillespie, what do you know of such things? Laplante can win a girl by just looking at her—French way, you know—he can pose better than a poem!"

"Blockhead," I ground out between my teeth, a feeling taking possession of me, which is designated "indignation" in the first person but jealousy in the second and third. "You stupid simpleton, that Laplante is a villain who will turn your addled pate and work you as an old wife kneads dough."

"What do you know about Laplante?" he demanded hotly.

"I know he is an accomplished blackguard," I answered quietly, "and if you want to spoil your chances with the Little Statue, just prance round in his company."

The lad was too much surprised to speak.

"Where's Hamilton?" I asked.

"Find him for yourself," said he, going off in a huff.

I edged cautiously near enough the wounded man to see that he was not Hamilton. Near the litter was a group of clerks.

"They're fools," one clerk was informing the others. "Cameron sent word he'd have McDonell dead or alive. If he doesn't give himself up, this fort'll go and the whole settlement be massacred."

"Been altogether too high-handed anyway," answered another. "I'm loyal to my company; but Lord Selkirk can't set up a military despotism here. Been altogether better if we'd left the Nor'-Westers alone."

"It's all the fault of that cocky little martinet," declared a third.

"I say," exclaimed a man joining the group, "d' y' hear the news? All the chiefs in there—" jerking his thumb towards a side door—"are advising Captain McDonell to give himself up and save the fort."

"Good thing. Who'll miss him? He'll only get a free trip to Montreal," remarked one of the aggressives in this group. "I tell you, men, both companies have gone a deal too far in this little slap-back game to be keen for legal investigation. Why, at Souris, everybody knows——"

He lowered his voice and I unconsciously moved from my dark corner to hear the rest.

"Hoo are ye, gillie?" said the burly Scot in my ear.

Turning, I found the canny swain had followed me on an investigating tour. Again I gave him an inarticulate reply and lost myself among other coteries. Was the man spying on me? I reflected that if "the chiefs"—as the Hudson's Bay man had called them—were in the side room, Eric Hamilton would be among these conferring with the governor. As I approached the door, I noticed my Scotch friend had taken some one into his confidence and two men were now on my tracks. Lifting the latch, I gave a gentle, cautious push and the hinges swung so quietly I had slipped into the room before those inside or out could prevent me. I found myself in the middle of a long apartment with low, sloping ceiling, and deep window recesses. It had evidently been partitioned off from the main hall; for the wall, ceiling and floor made an exact triangle. At one end of the place was a table. Round this was a group of men deeply engrossed in some sort of conference. Sitting on the window sills and lounging round the box stove behind the table were others of our rival's service. I saw at once it would be difficult to have access to Hamilton. He was lying on a stretcher within talking range of the table and had one arm in a sling. Now, I hold it is harder for the unpractised man to play the spy with everything in his favor, than for the adept to act that rôle against the impossible. One is without the art that foils detection. The other can defy detection. So I stood inside with my hand on the door lest the click of the closing latch should rouse attention, but had no thought of prying into Hudson's Bay secrets.

"Your Honor," began Hamilton in a lifeless manner, which told me his search had been bootless, and he turned languidly towards a puffy, crusty, military gentleman, whom, from the respect shown him, I judged to be Governor McDonell. "Duncan Cameron's warrant for the arrest is perfectly legal. If Your Honor should surrender yourself, you will save Fort Douglas for the Hudson's Bay Company. Besides, the whole arrest will prove a farce. The law in Lower Canada provides no machinery for the trial of cases occurring——" Here Hamilton came to a blank and unexpected stop, for his eyes suddenly alighted on me with a look that forbade recognition, and fled furtively back to the group it the table. I understood and kept silent.

"For the trial of cases occurring?" asked the governor sharply.

"Occurring—here," added Hamilton, shooting out the last word as if his arm had given him a sudden twinge. "And so I say, Your Honor will lose nothing by giving yourself up to the Nor'-Westers, and will save Fort Douglas for the Hudson's Bay."

"The doctor tells me it's a compound fracture. You'll find it painful, Mr. Hamilton," said Governor McDonell sympathetically, and he turned to the papers over which the group were conferring. "I'm no great hand in winning victories by showing the white flag," began the gallant captain, "but if a free trip from here to Montreal satisfies those fools, I'll go."

"Well said! Bravo! Your Honor," exclaimed a shaggy member of the council, bringing his fist down on the table with a thud. "I call that diplomacy, outmanœuvring the enemy! Your Honor sets an example for abiding by the law; you obey the warrant. They must follow the example and leave Fort Douglas alone."

"Besides, I can let His Lordship know from Montreal just what reinforcements are needed here," continued Captain McDonell, with a curious disregard for the law which he professed to be obeying, and a faithful zeal for Lord Selkirk.

Hamilton was looking anxiously at me with an expression of warning which I could not fully read. Then I felt, what every one must have felt at some time, that a third person was watching us both. Following Eric's glance to a dark window recess directly opposite the door where I stood, I was horrified and riveted by the beady, glistening, insolent eyes of Louis Laplante, gazing out of the dusk with an expression of rakish amusement, the amusement of a spider when a fly walks into its web. Taken unawares I have ever been more or less of what Mr. Jack MacKenzie was wont to call "a stupid loon!" On discovering Laplante I promptly sustained my reputation by letting the door fly to with a sharp click that startled the whole room-full. Whereat Louis Laplante gave a low, soft laugh.

"What do you want here, man?" demanded Governor McDonell's sharp voice.

Jerking off my cap, I saluted.

"My man, Your Honor," interjected Eric quietly. "Come here, Rufus," he commanded, motioning me to his side with the hauteur of a master towards a servant. And Louis Laplante rose and tip-toed after me with a tigerish malice that recalled the surly squaw.

"Oh, Eric!" I cried out eagerly. "Are you hurt, and at such a time?" Unconsciously I was playing into Louis' hands, for he stood by the stove, laughing nonchalantly.

Thereupon Eric ground out some imprecation at my stupidity.

"There's been a shuffling of allegiance, I hear," he said with a queer misleading look straight at Laplante. "We've recruits from Fort Gibraltar."

Eric's words, curiously enough, banished triumph from Laplante's face and the Frenchman's expression was one of puzzled suspicion. From Eric's impassive features, he could read nothing. What Hamilton was driving at, I should presently learn; but to find out I would no more take my eyes from Laplante's than from a tiger about to spring. At once, to get my attention, Hamilton brought a stick down on my toes with a sharpness that made me leap. By all the codes of nudges and kicks and such signaling, it is a principle that a blow at one end of human anatomy drives through the density of the other extremity. It dawned on me that Eric was trying to persuade Laplante I had deserted Nor'-Westers for the Hudson's Bay. The ethics of his attempt I do not defend. It was after the facile fashion of an intriguing era. A sharper weapon was presently given us against Louis Laplante; for when I grasped Eric's stick to stay the raps against my feet, I felt the handle rough with carving.

"What are these carvings, may I inquire, Sir?" I asked, assuming the strangeness, which Eric's signals had directed, but never moving my eyes from Laplante. The villain who had befooled me in the gorge and eluded me in the forest, and now tormented Frances Sutherland, winced under my watchfulness.

"The carvings!" answered Eric, annoyed that I did not return his plain signals and determined to get my eye. "Pray look for yourself! Where are your eyes?"

"I can't see in this poor light, Sir; but I also have a strangely carved thing—a spear-head. Now if this head has no handle and this handle has no head—they might fit," I went on watching Laplante, whose saucy assurance was deserting him.

"Spear-head!" exclaimed Hamilton, beginning to understand I too had my design. "Where did you find it?"

"Trying to bury itself in my head." I returned. At this, Laplante, the knave, smiled graciously in my very face.

"But it didn't succeed?" asked Hamilton.

"No—it mistook me for a tree, missed the mark and went into the tree; just as another friend of mine mistook me for a tree, hit the mark and ran into me," and I smiled back at Laplante. His face clouded. That reference to the scene on the beach, where his Hudson's Bay despatches were stolen, was too much for his hot blood. "Here it is," I continued, pulling the spear-head out of my plaid. I had brought it to Hamilton, hoping to identify our enemy, and we did. "Please see if they fit, Sir? We might identify our—friends!" and I searched the furtive, guilty eyes of the Frenchman.

"Dat frien'," muttered Louis with a threatening look at me, "dat frien' of Mister Hamilton he spike good English for Scot' youth."

Now Louis, as I remembered from Laval days, never mixed his English and French, except when he was in passion furious beyond all control.

"Fit!" cried Hamilton. "They're a perfect fit, and both carved the same, too."

"With what?"

"Eagles," answered Eric, puzzled at my drift, and Louis Laplante wore the last look of the tiger before it springs.

"And eagles," said I, defying the spring, "signify that both the spear-head and the spear-handle belong to the Sioux chief whose daughter"—and I lowered my voice to a whisper which only Laplante and Hamilton could hear—"is married—to Le—Grand—Diable!"

"What!" came Hamilton's low cry of agony. Forgetting the fractured arm, he sprang erect.

And Louis Laplante staggered back in the dark as if we had struck him.

"Laplante! Laplante! Where's that Frenchman? Bring him up here!" called Governor McDonell's fussy, angry tones.

Coming when it did, this demand was to Louis a bolt of judgment; and he joined the conference with a face as gray as ashes.

"Now about those stolen despatches! We want to know the truth! Were you drunk, or were you not? Who has them?" Captain McDonell arraigned the Frenchman with a fire of questions that would have confused any other culprit but Louis.

"Eric," I whispered, taking advantage of the respite offered by Louis' examination. "We found Laplante at Pointe a la Croix. He was drunk. He confessed Miriam is held by Diable's squaw. Then we discovered someone was listening to the confession and pursued the eavesdropper into the bush. When we came back, Laplante had been carried off. I found one of my canoemen had your lost fowling-piece, and it was he who had listened and carried off the drunk sot and tried to send that spear-head into me at the Sault. 'Twas Diable, Eric! Father Holland, a priest in our company, told me of the white woman on Lake Winnipeg. Did you find this—" indicating the spear handle—"there?"

Eric, cold, white and trembling, only whispered an affirmative.

"Was that all?"

"All," he answered, a strange, fierce look coming over his face, as the full import of my news forced home on him. "Was—was—Laplante—in that?" he asked, gripping my arm in his unwounded hand with foreboding force.

"Not that we know of. Only Diable. But Louis is friendly with the Sioux, and if we only keep him in sight we may track them."

"I'll—keep—him—in sight," muttered Hamilton in low, slow words.

"Hush, Eric!" I whispered. "If we harm him, he may mislead us. Let us watch him and track him!"

"He's asking leave to go trapping in the Sioux country. Can you go as trader for your people? To the buffalo hunt first, then, south? I'll watch here, if he stays; you, there, if he goes, and he shall tell us all he knows or—"

"Hush, man," I urged. "Listen!"

"Where," Governor McDonell was thundering at Laplante, "where are the parties that stole those despatches?"

The question brought both Hamilton and myself to the table. We went forward where we could see Laplante's face without being seen by his questioners.

"If I answer, Your Honor," began the Frenchman, taking the captain's bluster for what it was worth and holding out doggedly for his own rights, "I'll be given leave to trap with the Sioux?"

"Certainly, man. Speak out."

"The parties—that stole—those despatches," Laplante was answering slowly. At this stage he looked at his interlocutor as if to question the sincerity of the guarantee and he saw me standing screwing the spear-head on the tell-tale handle. I patted the spear-head, smiled blandly back, and with my eyes dared him to go on. He paused, bit his lip and flushed.

"No lies, no roguery, or I'll have you at the whipping-post," roared the governor. "Speak up. Where are the parties?"

"Near about here," stammered Louis, "and you may ask your new turn-coat."

I was betrayed! Betrayed and trapped; but he should not go free! I would have shouted out, but Hamilton's hand silenced me.

"Here!" exclaimed the astounded governor. "Go call that young Nor'-Wester! If he backs up y'r story, he was Cameron's secretary, you can go to the buffalo hunt."

That response upset Louis' bearings. He had expected the governor would refer to me; but the command let him out of an awkward place and he darted from the room, as Hamilton and I supposed,—simpletons that we were with that rogue!—to find the young Nor'-Wester. This turn of affairs gave me my chance. If the young Nor'-Wester and Laplante came together, my disguise as Highlander and turn-coat would be stripped from me and I should be trapped indeed.

"Good-by, old boy!" and I gripped Hamilton's hand. "If he stays, he's your game. When he goes, he's mine. Good luck to us both! You'll come south when you're better."

Then I bolted through the main hall thinking to elude the canny Scots, but saw both men in the stairway waiting to intercept me. When I ran down a flight of side stairs, they dashed to trap me at the gate. At the doorway a man lounged against me. The lantern light fell on a pointed beard. It was Laplante, leaning against the wall for support and shaking with laughter.

"You again, old tombstone! Whither away so fast?" and he made to hold me. "I'm in a hurry myself! My last night under a roof, ha! ha! Wait till I make my grand farewell! We both did well, did the grand, ho! ho! But I must leave a fair demoiselle!"

"Let go," and I threw him off.

"Take that, you ramping donkey, you Anglo-Saxon animal," and he aimed a kick in my direction. Though I could ill spare the time to do it, I turned. All the pent-up strength, from the walk with Frances Sutherland rushed into my clenched fist and Louis Laplante went down with a thud across the doorway. There was the sish-rip of a knife being thrust through my boot, but the blade broke and I rushed past the prostrate form.

Certain of waylaying me, the Scots were dodging about the gate; but by running in the shadow of the warehouse to the rear of the court, I gave both the slip. I had no chance to reconnoitre, but dug my hunting-knife into the stockade, hoisted myself up the wooden wall, got a grip of the top and threw myself over, escaping with no greater loss than boots pulled off before climbing the palisade, and the Highland cap which stuck fast to a picket as I alighted below. At dawn, bootless and hatless, I came in sight of Fort Gibraltar and Father Holland, who was scanning the prairie for my return, came running to greet me.

"The tip-top o' the mornin' to the renegade! I thought ye'd been scalped—and so ye have been—nearly—only they mistook y'r hat for the wool o' y'r crown. Boots gone too! Out wid your midnight pranks."

A succession of welcoming thuds accompanied the tirade. As breath returned, I gasped out a brief account of the night.

"And now," he exclaimed triumphantly, "I have news to translate ye to a sivinth hiven! Och! But it's clane cracked ye'll be when ye hear it. Now, who's appointed to trade with the buffalo hunters but y'r very self?"

It was with difficulty I refrained from embracing the bearer of such good tidings.

"Be easy," he commanded. "Ye'll need these demonstrations, I'm thinkin'—huntin' one lass and losin' y'r heart to another."

We arranged he should go to Fort Douglas for Frances Sutherland and I was to set out later. They were to ride along the river-path south of the forks where I could join them. I, myself, picked out and paid for two extra horses, one a quiet little cayuse with ambling action, the other, a muscular broncho. I had the satisfaction of seeing Father Holland mounted on the latter setting out for Fort Douglas, while the Indian pony wearing an empty side-saddle trotted along in tow.

The information I brought back from Fort Douglas delayed any more hostile demonstrations against the Hudson's Bay. That very morning, before I had finished breakfast, Governor McDonell rode over to Fort Gibraltar, and on condition that Fort Douglas be left unmolested gave himself up to the Nor'-Westers. At noon, when I was riding off to the buffalo hunt and the Missouri, I saw the captain, smiling and debonair, embarking—or rather being embarked—with North-West brigades, to be sent on a free trip two thousand five hundred miles to Montreal.

"A safe voyage to ye," said Duncan Cameron, commander of Nor'-Westers, as the ex-governor of Red River settled himself in a canoe. "A safe voyage to ye, mon!"

"And a prosperous return," was the ironical answer of the dauntless ruler over the Hudson's Bay.

"Sure now, Rufus," said Father Holland to me a year afterwards, "'twas a prosperous return he had!"

Fortunately, I had my choice of scouts, and, by dangling the prospects of a buffalo hunt before La Robe Noire and Little Fellow, tempted them to come with me.

CHAPTER XII

HOW A YOUTH BECAME A KING

When the prima-donna of some vauntful city trills her bird-song above the foot-lights, or the cremona moans out the sigh of night-winds through the forest, artificial townsfolk applaud. Yet a nesting-tree, a thousand leagues from city discords, gives forth better music with deeper meaning and higher message—albeit the songster sings only from love of song. The fretted folk of the great cities cannot understand the witching fascinations of a wild life in a wild, free, tameless land, where God's own hand ministers to eye and ear. To fare sumptuously, to dress with the faultless distinction that marks wealth, to see and above all to be seen—these are the empty ends for which city men engage in a mad, feverish pursuit of wealth, trample one another down in a strife more ruthless than war and gamble away gifts of mind and soul. These are the things for which they barter all freedom but the name. Where one succeeds a thousand fail. Those with higher aims count themselves happy, indeed, to possess a few square feet of canvas, that truly represents the beauty dear to them, before weeds had undermined and overgrown and choked the temple of the soul. That any one should exchange gilded chains for freedom to give manhood shoulder swing, to be and to do—without infringing on the liberty of others to be and to do—is to such folk a matter of no small wonderment. For my part, I know I was counted mad by old associates of Quebec when I chose the wild life of the north country.

But each to his taste, say I; and all this is only the opinion of an old trader, who loved the work of nature more than the work of man. Other voices may speak to other men and teach them what the waterways and forests, the plains and mountains, were teaching me. If "ologies" and "ics," the lore of school and market, comfort their souls—be it so. As for me, it was only when half a continent away from the jangle of learning and gain that I began to stir like a living thing and to know that I existed. The awakening began on the westward journey; but the new life hardly gained full possession before that cloudless summer day on the prairie, when I followed the winding river trail south of the forks. The Indian scouts were far to the fore. Rank grass, high as the saddle-bow, swished past the horse's sides and rippled away in an unbroken ocean of green to the encircling horizon. Of course allowance must be made for a man in love. Other men have discovered a worldful of beauty, when in love; but I do not see what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse of the forms before me brought peace into the whole world.

Father Holland evidently saw me, for he turned and waved. The other rider gave no sign of recognition. A touch of the spur to my horse and I was abreast of them, Frances Sutherland curveting her cayuse from the trail to give me middle place.

"Arrah, me hearty, here ye are at last! Och, but ye're a skulkin' wight," called the priest as I saluted both. "What d'y' say for y'rself, ye belated rascal, comin' so tardy when ye're headed for Gretna Green—Och! 'Twas a lapsus linguæ! 'Tis Pembina—not Gretna Green—that I mean."

Had it been half a century later, when a little place called Gretna sprang up on this very trail, Frances Sutherland and I need not have flinched at this reference to an old-world Mecca for run-away lovers. But there was no Gretna on the Pembina trail in those days and the Little Statue's cheeks were suddenly tinged deep red, while I completely lost my tongue.

"Not a word for y'rself?" continued the priest, giving me full benefit of the mischievous spirit working in him. "He, who bearded the foe in his den, now meeker than a lambkin, mild as a turtle-dove, timid as a pigeon, pensive as a whimpering-robin that's lost his mate——"

"There ought to be a law against the jokes of the clergy, Sir," I interrupted tartly. "The jokes aren't funny and one daren't hit back."

"There ought to be a law against lovers, me hearty," laughed he. "They're always funny, and they can't stand a crack."

"Against all men," ventured Frances Sutherland with that instinctive, womanly tact, which whips recalcitrant talkers into line like a deft driver reining up kicking colts. "All men should be warranted safe, not to go off."

"Unless there's a fair target," and the priest looked us over significantly and laughed. If he felt a gentle pull on the rein, he yielded not a jot. Unluckily there are no curb-bits for hard-mouthed talkers.

"Rufus, I don't see that ye wear a ticket warranting ye'll not go off," he added merrily. Red became redder on two faces, and hot, hotter with at least one temper.

"And womankind?" I managed to blurt out, trying to second her efforts against our tormentor. "What guarantee against dangers from them? The pulpit silenced—though that's a big contract—mankind labeled, what for women?"

"Libeled," she retorted. "Men say we don't hit straight enough to be dangerous."

"The very reason ye are dangerous," the priest broke in. "Ye aim at a head and hit a heart! Then away ye go to Gretna Green—och! It's Pembina, I mean! Marry, my children——" and he paused.

"Marry!—What?" I shouted. Thereupon Frances Sutherland broke into peals of laughter, in which I could see no reason, and Father Holland winked.

"What's wrong with ye?" asked the priest solemnly. "Faith, 'tis no advice I'm giving; but as I was remarking, marry, my children, I'd sooner stand before a man not warranted safe than a woman, who might take to shying pretty charms at my head! Faith, me lambs, ye'll learn that I speak true."

As Mr. Jack MacKenzie used to put it in his peppery reproof, I always did have a knack of tumbling head first the instant an opportunity offered. This time I had gone in heels and all, and now came up in as fine a confusion as any bashful bumpkin ever displayed before his lady. Frances Sutherland had regained her composure and came to my rescue with another attempt to take the lead from the loquacious churchman.

"I'm so grateful to you for arranging this trip," and she turned directly to me.

"Hm-m," blurted Father Holland with unutterable merriment, before I could get a word in, "he's grateful to himself for that same thing. Faith! He's been thankin' the stars, especially Venus, ever since he got marching orders!"

"How did you reach Fort Gibraltar?" she persisted.

"Sans boots and cap," I promptly replied, determined to be ahead of the interloper.

"Sans heart, too," and the priest flicked my broncho with his whip and knocked the ready-made speech, with which I had hoped to silence him, clean out of my head. Frances Sutherland took to examining remote objects on the horizon. Hers was a nature not to be beaten.

"Let us ride faster," she suddenly proposed with a glance that boded roguery for the priest's portly form. She was off like a shaft from a bow-string, causing a stampede of our horses. That was effective. A hard gallop against a stiff prairie wind will stop a stout man's eloquence.

"Ho youngsters!" exclaimed the priest, coming abreast of us as we reined up behind the scouts. "If ye set me that gait—whew—I'll not be left for Gretna Green—Faith—it's Pembina, I mean," and he puffed like a cargo boat doing itself proud among the great liners.

He was breathless, therefore safe. Frances Sutherland was not disposed to break the accumulating silence, and I, for the life of me, could not think of a single remark appropriate for a party of three. The ordinary commonplaces, that stop-gap conversation, refused to come forth. I rehearsed a multitude of impossible speeches; but they stuck behind sealed lips.

"Silence is getting heavy, Rufus," he observed, enjoying our embarrassment.

Thus we jogged forward for a mile or more.

"Troth, me pet lambs," he remarked, as breath returned, "ye'll both bleat better without me!"

Forthwith, away he rode fifty yards ahead, keeping that distance beyond us for the rest of the day and only calling over his shoulder occasionally.

"Och! But y'r bronchos are slow! Don't be telling me y'r bronchos are not slow! Arrah, me hearties, be making good use o' the honeymoon,—I mean afternoon, not honeymoon. Marry, me children, but y'r bronchos are bog-spavined and spring-halted. Jiggle-joggle faster, with ye, ye rascals! Faith, I see ye out o' the tail o' my eye. Those bronchos are nosing a bit too close, I'm thinkin'! I'm going to turn! I warn ye fair—ready! One—shy-off there! Two—have a care! Three—I'm coming! Four—prepare!"

And he would glance back with shouts of droll laughter. "Get epp! We mustn't disturb them! Get epp!" This to his own horse and off he would go, humming some ditty to the lazy hobble of his nag.

"Old angel!" said I, under my breath, and I fell to wondering what earthly reason any man had for becoming a priest.

He was right. Talk no longer lagged, whatever our bronchos did; but, indeed, all we said was better heard by two than three. Why that was, I cannot tell, for like beads of a rosary our words were strung together on things commonplace enough; and fond hearts, as well as mystics, have a key to unlock a world of meaning from meaningless words. Tufts of poplars, wood islands on the prairie, skulking coyotes, that prowled to the top of some earth mound and uttered their weird cries, mud-colored badgers, hulking clumsily away to their treacherous holes, gophers, sly fellows, propped on midget tails pointing fore-paws at us—these and other common things stole the hours away. The sun, dipping close to the sky-line, shone distorted through the warm haze like a huge blood shield. Far ahead our scouts were pitching tents on ground well back from the river to avoid the mosquitoes swarming above the water. It was time to encamp for the night.

Those long June nights in the far north with fire glowing in the track of a vanished sun and stillness brooding over infinite space—have a glory, that is peculiarly their own. Only a sort of half-darkness lies between the lingering sunset and the early sun-dawn. At nine o'clock the sun-rim is still above the western prairie. At ten, one may read by daylight, and, if the sky is clear, forget for another hour that night has begun. After supper, Father Holland sat at a distance from the tents with his back carefully turned towards us, a precaution on his part for which I was not ungrateful. Frances Sutherland was throned on the boxes of our quondam table, and I was reclining against saddle-blankets at her feet.

"Oh! To be so forever," she exclaimed, gazing at the globe of solid gold against the opal-green sky. "To have the light always clear, just ahead, nothing between us and the light, peace all about, no care, no weariness, just quiet and beauty like this forever."

"Like this forever! I ask nothing better," said I with great heartiness; but neither her eyes nor her thoughts were for me. Would the eyes looking so intently at the sinking sun, I wondered, condescend to look at a spot against the sun. In desperation I meditated standing up. 'Tis all very well to talk of storming the citadel of a closed heart, but unless telepathic implements of war are perfected to the same extent as modern armaments, permitting attack at long range, one must first get within shooting distance. Apparently I was so far outside the defences, even my design was unknown.

"I think," she began in low, hesitating words, so clear and thrilling, they set my heart beating wildly with a vague expectation, "I think heaven must be very, very near on nights like this, don't—you—Rufus?"

I wasn't thinking of heaven at all, at least, not the heaven she had in mind; but if there is one thing to make a man swear white is black and black white and to bring him to instantaneous agreement with any statement whatsoever, it is to hear his Christian name so spoken for the first time. I sat up in an electrified way that brought the fringe of lashes down to hide those gray eyes.

"Very near? Well rather! I've been in heaven all day," I vowed. "I've been getting glimpses of paradise all the way from Fort William——"

"Don't," she interrupted with a flash of the imperious nature, which I knew. "Please don't, Mr. Gillespie."

"Please don't Mister Gillespie me," said I, piqued by a return to the formal. "If you picked up Rufus by mistake from the priest, he sets a good example. Don't drop a good habit!"

That was my first step inside the outworks.

"Rufus," she answered so gently I felt she might disarm and slay me if she would, "Rufus Gillespie"—that was a return of the old spirit, a compromise between her will and mine—"please don't begin saying that sort of thing—there's a whole day before us——"

"And you think I can't keep it up?"

"You haven't given any sign of failing. You know, Rufus," she added consolingly, "you really must not say those things, or something will be hurt! You'll make me hurt it."

"Something is hurt and needs mending, Miss Sutherland——"

"Don't Miss Sutherland me," she broke in with a laugh, "call me Frances; and if something is hurt and needs mending, I'm not a tinker, though my father and the priest—yes and you, too—sometimes think so. But sisters do mending, don't they?" and she laughed my earnestness off as one would puff out a candle.

"No—no—no—not sisters—not that," I protested. "I have no sisters, Little Statue. I wouldn't know how to act with a sister, unless she were somebody else's sister, you know. I can't stand the sisterly business, Frances——"

"Have you suffered much from the sisterly?" she asked with a merry twinkle.

"No," I hastened to explain, "I don't know how to play the sisterly touch-and-go at all, but the men tell me it doesn't work—dead failure, always ends the same. Sister proposes, or is proposed to——"

"Oh!" cried the Little Statue with the faintest note of alarm, and she moved back from me on the boxes. "I think we'd better play at being very matter-of-fact friends for the rest of the trip."

"No, thank you, Miss Sutherland—Frances, I mean," said I. "I'm not the fool to pretend that——"

"Then pretend anything you like," and there was a sudden coldness in her voice, which showed me she regarded my refusal and the slip in her name as a rebuff. "Pretend anything you like, only don't say things."

That was a throwing down of armor which I had not expected.

"Then pretend that a pilgrim was lost in the dark, lost where men's souls slip down steep places to hell, and that one as radiant as an angel from heaven shone through the blackness and guided him back to safe ground," I cried, taking quick advantage of my fair antagonist's sudden abandon and casting aside all banter.

"Children! children!" cried the priest. "Children! Sun's down! Time to go to your trundles, my babes!"

"Yes, yes," I shouted. "Wait till I hear the rest of this story."

At my words she had started up with a little gasp of fright. A look of awe came into her gray eyes, which I have seen on the faces of those who find themselves for the first time beside the abyss of a precipice. And I have climbed many lofty peaks, but never one without passing these places with the fearful possibilities of destruction. Always the novice has looked with the same unspeakable fear into the yawning depths, with the same unspeakable yearning towards the jewel-crowned heights beyond. This, or something of this, was in the startled attitude of the trembling figure, whose eyes met mine without flinching or favor.

"Or pretend that a traveler had lost his compass, and though he was without merit, God gave him a star."

"Is it a pretty story, Rufus?" called the priest.

"Very," I cried out impatiently. "Don't interrupt."

"Or pretend that a poor fool with no merit but his love of purity and truth and honor lost his way to paradise, and God gave him an angel for a guide."

"Is it a long story, Rufus?" called the priest.

"It's to be continued," I shouted, leaping to my feet and approaching her.

"And pretend that the pilgrim and the traveler and the fool, asked no other privilege but to give each his heart's love, his life's devotion to her who had come between him and the darkness——"

"Rufus!" roared the priest. "I declare I'll take a stick to you. Come away! D' y' hear? She's tired."

"Good-night," she answered, in a broken whisper, so cold it stabbed me like steel; and she put out her hand in the mechanical way of the well-bred woman in every land.

"Is that all?" I asked, holding the hand as if it had been a galvanic battery, though the priest was coming straight towards us.

"All?" she returned, the lashes falling over the misty, gray eyes. "Ah, Rufus! Are we playing jest is earnest, or earnest is jest?" and she turned quickly and went to her tent.

How long I stood in reverie, I do not know. The priest's broad hand presently came down on my shoulder with a savage thud.

"Ye blunder-busticus, ye, what have ye been doing?" he asked. "The Little Statue was crying when she went to her tent."

"Crying?"

"Yes, ye idiot. I'll stay by her to-morrow."

And he did. Nor could he have contrived severer punishment for the unfortunate effect of my words. Fool, that I was! I should keep myself in hand henceforth. How many men have made that vow regarding the woman they love? Those that have kept it, I trow, could be counted easily enough. But I had no opportunity to break my vow; for the priest rode with Frances Sutherland the whole of the second day, and not once did he let loose his scorpion wit. She had breakfast alone in her tent next morning, the priest carrying tea and toast to her; and when she came out, she leaped to her saddle so quickly I lost the expected favor of placing that imperious foot in the stirrup. We set out three abreast, and I had no courage to read my fate from the cold, marble face. The ground became rougher. We were forced to follow long detours round sloughs, and I gladly fell to the rear where I was unobserved. Clumps of willows alone broke the endless dip of the plain. Glassy creeks glittered silver through the green, and ever the trail, like a narrow ribbon of many loops, fled before us to the dim sky-line.

When we halted for our nooning, Frances Sutherland had slipped from her saddle and gone off picking prairie roses before either the priest or I noticed her absence.

"If you go off, you nuisance, you," said the priest rubbing his bald pate, and gazing after her in a puzzled way, when we had the meal ready, "I think she'll come back and eat."

I promptly took myself off and had the glum pleasure of hearing her chat in high spirits over the dinner table of packing boxes; but she was on her cayuse and off with the scouts long before Father Holland and I had mounted.

"Rufus," said the priest with a comical, quizzical look, as we set off together. "Rufus, I think y'r a fool."

"I've thought that several hundred thousand times myself, this morning."

"Have ye as much as got a glint of her eye to-day?"

"No. I can't compete against the Church with women. Any fool knows that, even as big a fool as I."

"Tush, youngster! Don't take to licking your raw tongue up and down the cynic's saw edge! Put a spur to your broncho there and ride ahead with her."

"Having offended a goddess, I don't wish to be struck dead by inviting her wrath."

"Pah! I've no patience with y'r ramrod independence! Bend a stiff neck, or you'll break a sore heart! Ride ahead, I tell you, you young mule!" and he brought a smart flick across my broncho.

"Father Holland," I made answer with the dignity of a bishop and my nose mighty high in the air, "will you permit me to suggest that people know their own affairs best——"