.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 43640
   :PG.Title: Lost in the Wilds
   :PG.Released: 2013-09-03
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Eleanor Stredder
   :DC.Title: Lost in the Wilds
              A Canadian Story
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1893
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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LOST IN THE WILDS
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      Cover

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   .. _`It was an awful moment.`:

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      :alt: It was an awful moment.

      It was an awful moment.

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      LOST IN THE WILDS

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      A CANADIAN STORY

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      BY ELEANOR STREDDER

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      LONDON, EDINBURGH,
      DUBLIN, & NEW YORK
      THOMAS NELSON
      AND SONS
      1893

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   CONTENTS.

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I.  `In Acland's Hut`_
II.  `Hunting the Buffalo`_
III.  `The First Snowstorm`_
IV.  `Maxica, the Cree Indian`_
V.  `In the Birch-bark Hut`_
VI.  `Searching for a Supper`_
VII.  `Following the Blackfeet`_
VIII.  `The Shop in the Wilderness`_
IX.  `New Friends`_
X.  `The Dog-sled`_
XI.  `The Hunters' Camp`_
XII.  `Maxica's Warning`_
XIII.  `Just in Time`_
XIV.  `Wedding Guests`_
XV.  `To the Rescue`_
XVI.  `In Confusion`_

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.. _`IN ACLAND'S HUT`:

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   LOST IN THE WILDS.

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   CHAPTER I.

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   *IN ACLAND'S HUT.*

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The October sun was setting over a wild, wide
waste of waving grass, growing dry and yellow
in the autumn winds.  The scarlet hips gleamed
between the whitening blades wherever the pale pink
roses of summer had shed their fragrant leaves.

But now the brief Indian summer was drawing to
its close, and winter was coming down upon that vast
Canadian plain with rapid strides.  The wailing cry
of the wild geese rang through the gathering stillness.

The driver of a rough Red River cart slapped the
boy by his side upon the shoulder, and bade him look
aloft at the swiftly-moving cloud of chattering beaks
and waving wings.

For a moment or two the twilight sky was darkened,
and the air was filled with the restless beat of
countless pinions.  The flight of the wild geese to the
warmer south told the same story, of approaching
snow, to the bluff carter.  He muttered something
about finding the cows which his young companion
did not understand.  The boy's eyes had travelled
from the winged files of retreating geese to the vast
expanse of sky and plain.  The west was all aglow
with myriad tints of gold and saffron and green,
reflected back from many a gleaming lakelet and
curving river, which shone like jewels on the broad
breast of the grassy ocean.  Where the dim sky-line
faded into darkness the Touchwood Hills cast a
blackness of shadow on the numerous thickets which fringed
their sheltering slopes.  Onward stole the darkness,
while the prairie fires shot up in wavy lines, like giant
fireworks.

Between the fire-flash and the dying sun the boy's
quick eye was aware of the long winding course of
the great trail to the north.  It was a comfort to
perceive it in the midst of such utter loneliness; for
if men had come and gone, they had left no other
record behind them.  He seemed to feel the stillness
of an unbroken solitude, and to hear the silence that
was brooding over lake and thicket, hill and waste
alike.

He turned to his companion.  "Forgill," he asked,
in a low venturing tone, "can you find your way in
the dark?"

He was answered by a low, short laugh, too
expressive of contempt to suffer him to repeat his
question.

One broad flash of crimson light yet lingered along
the western sky, and the evening star gleamed out
upon the shadowy earth, which the night was hugging
to itself closer and closer every moment.

Still the cart rumbled on.  It was wending now by
the banks of a nameless river, where the pale, faint
star-shine reflected in its watery depths gave back dim
visions of inverted trees in wavering, uncertain lines.

"How far are we now from Acland's Hut?" asked
the boy, disguising his impatience to reach their
journey's end in careless tones.

"Acland's Hut," repeated the driver; "why, it is
close at hand."

The horse confirmed this welcome piece of
intelligence by a joyous neigh to his companion, who was
following in the rear.  A Canadian always travels
with two horses, which he drives by turns.  The
horses themselves enter into the arrangement so well
that there is no trouble about it.  The loose horse
follows his master like a dog, and trots up when the
cart comes to a standstill, to take the collar warm from
his companion's shoulders.

But for once the loose pony had galloped past them
in the darkness, and was already whinnying at the
well-known gate of Acland's Hut.

The driver put his hand to his mouth and gave a
shout, which seemed to echo far and wide over the
silent prairie.  It was answered by a chorus of
barking from the many dogs about the farm.  A lantern
gleamed through the darkness, and friendly voices
shouted in reply.  Another bend in the river brought
them face to face with the rough, white gate of
Acland's Hut.  Behind lay the low farm-house, with
its log-built walls and roof of clay.  Already the door
stood wide, and the cheerful blaze from the pine-logs
burning on the ample hearth within told of the
hospitable welcome awaiting the travellers.

An unseen hand undid the creaking gate, and a
gruff voice from the darkness exchanged a hearty "All
right" with Forgill.  The lantern seemed to dance
before the horse's head, as he drew up beneath the
solitary tree which had been left for a hen-roost in
the centre of the enclosure.

Forgill jumped down.  He gave a helping hand to
his boy companion, observing, "There is your aunt
watching for you at the open door.  Go and make
friends; you won't be strangers long."

"Have you got the child, Forgill?" asked an
anxious woman's voice.

An old Frenchman, who fulfilled the double office
of man and maid at Acland's Hut, walked up to the
cart and held out his arms to receive the expected
visitor.

Down leaped the boy, altogether disdaining the
over-attention of the farming man.  Then he heard
Forgill whisper, "It isn't the little girl she expected,
it is this here boy; but I have brought him all the
same."

This piece of intelligence was received with a low
chuckle, and all three of the men became suddenly
intent upon the buckles of the harness, leaving aunt
and nephew to rectify the little mistake which had
clearly arisen—not that they had anything to do
with it.

"Come in," said the aunt in kindly tones, scarcely
knowing whether it was a boy or a girl that she was
welcoming.  But when the rough deer-skin in which
Forgill had enveloped his charge as the night drew
on was thrown aside, the look which spread over
her face was akin to consternation, as she asked his
name and heard the prompt reply, "Wilfred Acland;
and are you my own Aunt Miriam?  How is my
uncle?"  But question was exchanged for question
with exceeding rapidity.  Then remembering the boy's
long journey, Aunt Miriam drew a three-legged stool
in front of the blazing fire, and bade him be seated.

The owner of Acland's Hut was an aged man, the
eldest of a large family, while Wilfred's father was
the youngest.  They had been separated from each
other in early life; the brotherly tie between them
was loosely knitted.  Intervals of several years'
duration occurred in their correspondence, and many
a kindly-worded epistle failed to reach its destination;
for the adventurous daring of the elder brother led
him again and again to sell his holding, and push his
way still farther west.  He loved the ring of the
woodman's axe, the felling and the clearing.  He grew
rich from the abundant yield of the virgin soil, and
his ever-increasing droves of cattle grew fat and fine
in the grassy sea which surrounded his homestead.
All went well until his life of arduous toil brought
on an attack of rheumatic fever, which had left him
a bedridden old man.  Everything now depended
upon the energy of his sole surviving sister, who had
shared his fortunes.

Aunt Miriam retained a more affectionate remembrance
of Wilfred's father, who had been her playmate.
When the letter arrived announcing his death she was
plunged in despondency.  The letter had been sent
from place to place, and was nine months after date
before it reached Acland's Hut, on the verge of the
lonely prairie between the Qu'appelle and South
Saskatchewan rivers.  The letter was written by a
Mr. Cromer, who promised to take care of the child
the late Mr. Acland had left, until he heard from the
uncle he was addressing.

The brother and sister at Acland's Hut at once
started the most capable man on their farm to
purchase their winter stores and fetch the orphan
child.  Aunt Miriam looked back to the old letters
to ascertain its age.  In one of them the father
rejoiced over the birth of a son; in another he spoke
of a little daughter, named after herself; a third,
which lamented the death of his wife, told also of the
loss of a child—which, it did not say.  Aunt Miriam,
with a natural partiality for her namesake, decided,
as she re-read the brief letter, that it must be the girl
who was living; for it was then a baby, and every
one would have called it "the baby."  By using the
word "child," the poor father must have referred to
the eldest, the boy.

"Ah! very likely," answered her brother, who had
no secret preference to bias his expectations.  So the
conjecture came to be regarded as a certainty, until
Wilfred shook off the deer-skin and stood before his
aunt, a strong hearty boy of thirteen summers,
awkwardly shy, and alarmingly hungry.

But her welcome was not the less kindly, as she
heaped his plate again and again.  Wilfred was soon
nodding over his supper in the very front of the
blazing fire, basking in its genial warmth.  But the
delightful sense of comfort and enjoyment was rather
shaken when he heard his aunt speaking in the inner
room.

"Forgill has come back, Caleb; and after all it is
the boy."

"The boy, God bless him!  I only wish he were
more of a man, to take my place," answered the
dreamy voice of her sick brother, just rousing from his
slumbers.

"Oh, but I am so disappointed!" retorted Aunt
Miriam.  "I had been looking forward to a dear
little niece to cheer me through the winter.  I felt so
sure—"

"Now, now!" laughed the old man, "that is just
where it is.  If once you get an idea in your head,
there it wedges to the exclusion of everything else.
You like your own way, Miriam, but you cannot turn
your wishes into a coach and six to override
everything.  You cannot turn him into a girl."

Wilfred burst out laughing, as he felt himself very
unpromising material for the desired metamorphosis.

"How shall I keep him out of mischief when we
are all shut in with the snow?" groaned Aunt
Miriam.

"Let me look at him," said her brother, growing
excited.

When Wilfred stood by the bedside, his uncle took
the boy's warm hands in both his own and looked
earnestly in his bright open face.

"He will do," murmured the old man, sinking back
amongst his pillows.  "There, be a good lad; mind
what your aunt says to you, and make yourself at
home."

While he was speaking all the light there was in
the shadowy room shone full on Wilfred.

"He is like his father," observed Aunt Miriam.

"You need not tell me that," answered Caleb Acland,
turning away his face.

"Could we ever keep him out of mischief?" she
sighed.

Wilfred's merry laugh jarred on their ears.  They
forgot the lapse of time since his father's death, and
wondered to find him so cheerful.  Aunt and nephew
were decidedly out of time, and out of time means
out of tune, as Wilfred dimly felt, without divining
the reason.

Morning showed him his new home in its brightest
aspect.  He was up early and out with Forgill and
the dogs, busy in the long row of cattle-sheds which
sheltered one end of the farm-house, whilst a
well-planted orchard screened the other.

Wilfred was rejoicing in the clear air, the joyous
sunshine, and the wonderful sense of freedom which
seemed to pervade the place.  The wind was whispering
through the belt of firs at the back of the clearing
where Forgill had built his hut, as he made his way
through the long, tawny grass to gather the purple
vetches and tall star-like asters, still to be found by
the banks of the reed-fringed pool where Forgill was
watering the horses.

Wilfred was intent upon propitiating his aunt,
when he returned to the house with his autumn
bouquet, and a large basket of eggs which Forgill had
intrusted to his care.

Wilfred rushed into the kitchen, elate with his
morning ramble, and quite regardless of the long trail
of muddy footsteps with which he was soiling the
freshly-cleaned floor.

"Look!" cried Aunt Miriam; but she spoke to deaf
ears, for Wilfred's attention was suddenly absorbed
by the appearance of a stranger at the gate.  His
horse and gun proclaimed him an early visitor.  His
jaunty air and the glittering beads and many tassels
which adorned his riding-boots made Wilfred wonder
who he was.  He set his basket on the ground, and
was darting off again to open the gate, when Aunt
Miriam, finding her remonstrances vain, leaned across
the table on which she was arranging the family
breakfast and caught him by the arm.  Wilfred was
going so fast that the sudden stoppage upset his
equilibrium; down he went, smash into the basket of
eggs.  Out flew one-half in a frantic dance, while the
mangled remains of the other streamed across the floor.

"Oh! the eggs, the eggs!" exclaimed Wilfred.

Aunt Miriam, who was on the other side of the
table when he came in, had not noticed the basket he
was carrying.  She held up her hands in dismay,
exclaiming, "I am afraid, Wilfred, you are one of the
most aggravating boys that ever walked this earth."

For the frost was coming, and eggs were growing scarce.

"And so, auntie, since you can't transform me, you
have abased me utterly.  I humbly beg your pardon
from the very dust, and lay my poor bruised offering
at your indignant feet.  I thought the coach and six
was coming over me, I did indeed!" exclaimed Wilfred.

"Get up" reiterated Aunt Miriam angrily, her
vexation heightened by the burst of laughter which
greeted her ears from the open door, where the stranger
now stood shaking with merriment at the ridiculous
scene.

"Yes, off with you, you young beggar!" he repeated,
stepping aside good-naturedly to let Wilfred pass.
For what could a fellow do but go in such
disastrous circumstances?

"It is not to be expected that the missis will put
up with this sort of game," remarked Pêtre Fleurie,
as he passed him.

Wilfred began to think it better to forego his
breakfast than face his indignant aunt.  What did
she care for the handful of weeds?  The mud he had
gone through to get them had caused all the mischief.
Everywhere else the ground was dry and crisp with the
morning frost.  "What an unlucky dog I am!" thought
Wilfred dolefully.  "Haven't I made a bad beginning,
and I never meant to."  He crept under the orchard
railing to hide himself in his repentance and keep out
of everybody's way.

But it was not the weather for standing still, and
he longed for something to do.  He took to running
in and out amongst the now almost leafless fruit-trees
to keep himself warm.

Forgill, who was at work in the court putting the
meat-stage in order, looked down into the orchard
from the top of the ladder on which he was mounted,
and called to Wilfred to come and help him.

It was a very busy time on the farm.  Marley, the
other labourer, who was Forgill's chum in the little
hut in the corner, was away in the prairie looking up
the cows, which had been turned loose in the early
summer to get their own living, and must now be
brought in and comfortably housed for the winter.
Forgill had been away nearly a fortnight.  Hands
were short on the farm now the poor old master was
laid aside.  There was land to be sold all round them;
but at present it was unoccupied, and the nearest
settler was dozens of miles away.  Their only
neighbours were the roving hunters, who had no settled
home, but wandered about like gipsies, living entirely
by the chase and selling furs.  They were partly
descended from the old French settlers, and partly
Indians.  They were a careless, light-hearted, dashing
set of fellows, who made plenty of money when skins
were dear, and spent it almost as fast as it came.
Uncle Caleb thought it prudent to keep on friendly
terms with these roving neighbours, who were always
ready to give him occasional help, as they were always
well paid for it.

"There is one of these hunter fellows here now,"
said Forgill.  "The missis is arranging with him to
help me to get in the supply of meat for the winter."

The stage at which Forgill was hammering
resembled the framework of a very high, long, narrow
table, with four tall fir poles for its legs.  Here the
meat was to be laid, high up above the reach of the
many animals, wild and tame.  It would soon be
frozen through and through as hard as a stone, and
keep quite good until the spring thaws set in.

Wilfred was quickly on the top of the stage, enjoying
the prospect, for the atmosphere in Canada is so
clear that the eye can distinguish objects a very long
way off.  He had plenty of amusement watching the
great buzzards and hawks, which are never long out
of sight.  He had entered a region where birds
abounded.  There were cries in the air above and the
drumming note of the prairie-hen in the grass below.
There were gray clouds of huge white pelicans flapping
heavily along, and faster-flying strings of small
white birds, looking like rows of pearls waving in the
morning air.  A moving band, also of snowy white,
crossing the blue water of a distant lakelet, puzzled
him a while, until it rose with a flutter and scream,
and proved itself another flock of northern geese on
wing for the south, just pausing on its way to drink.

Presently Wilfred was aware that Pêtre was at the
foot of the ladder talking earnestly to Forgill.  An
unpleasant tingling in his cheek told the subject of
their conversation.  He turned his back towards
them, not choosing to hear the remarks they might
be making upon his escapade of the morning, until
old Pêtre—or Pête as he was usually called, for
somehow the "r" slipped out of his name on the English
lips around him—raised his voice, protesting, "You
and I know well how the black mud by the reed pool
sticks like glue.  Now, I say, put him on the little
brown pony, and take him with you."

"Follow the hunt!" cried Wilfred, overjoyed.  "Oh,
may I, Forgill?"





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.. _`HUNTING THE BUFFALO`:

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   CHAPTER II.


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   *HUNTING THE BUFFALO.*

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The cloudy morning ended in a brilliant noon.
Wilfred was in ecstasies when he found
himself mounted on the sagacious Brownie, who had
followed them like a dog on the preceding evening.

Aunt Miriam had consented to Pête's proposal with
a thankfulness which led the hunter, Hugh Bowkett,
to remark, as Wilfred trotted beside him, "Come, you
young scamp! so you are altogether beyond petticoat
government, are you?"

"That is not true," retorted Wilfred, "for I was
never out of her Majesty's dominion for a single hour
in my life."

It was a chance hit, for Bowkett had been over the
frontier more than once, wintering among the Yankee
roughs on the other side of the border, a proceeding
which is synonymous in the North-West Dominion
with "getting out of the way."

Bowkett was a handsome fellow, and a first-rate
shot, who could accomplish the difficult task of
hunting the long-eared, cunning moose-deer as well as a
born Red Indian.  Wilfred looked up at him with
secret admiration.  Not so Forgill, who owned to Pête
there was no dependence on these half-and-half
characters.  But without Bowkett's help there would be
no meat for the winter; and since the master had
decided the boy was to go with them, there was
nothing more to be said.

Aunt Miriam came to the gate, in her hood and
cloak, to see them depart.

"Good-bye! good-bye, auntie!" shouted Wilfred.
"I am awfully sorry about those eggs."

"Ah, you rogue! do you think I am going to
believe you?"  She laughed, shaking a warning finger
at him; and so they parted, little dreaming of all that
would happen before they met again.

Wilfred was equipped in an old, smoked deer-skin
coat of his uncle's, and a fur cap with a flap falling
like a cape on his neck, and ear-pieces which met
under his chin.  He was a tall boy of his age, and
his uncle was a little, wiry man.  The coat was not
very much too long for him.  It wrapped over
famously in front, and was belted round the waist.  Pête
had filled the pockets with a good supply of biscuit,
and one or two potatoes, which he thought Wilfred
could roast for his supper in the ashes of the
campfire.  For the hunting-party expected to camp out in
the open for a night or two, as the buffaloes they
were in quest of were further to seek and harder to
find every season.

Forgill had stuck a hunting-knife in Wilfred's belt,
to console him for the want of a gun.  The boy would
have liked to carry a gun like the others, but on that
point there was a resolute "No" all round.

As they left the belt of pine trees, and struck out
into the vast, trackless sea of grass, Wilfred looked
back to the light blue column of smoke from the
farm-house chimney, and wistfully watched it curling
upwards in the clear atmosphere, with a dash of regret
that he had not yet made friends with his uncle, or
recovered his place in Aunt Miriam's good graces.
But it scarcely took off the edge of his delight.

Forgill was in the cart, which he hoped to bring
back loaded with game.  At the corner of the first
bluff, as the hills in Canada are usually called, they
encountered Bowkett's man with a string of horses,
one of which he rode.  There was a joyous blaze of
sunshine glinting through the broad fringes of white
pines which marked the course of the river, making
redder the red stems of the Norwegians which sprang
up here and there in vivid contrast.  A light canoe of
tawny birch-bark, with its painted prow, was
threading a narrow passage by the side of a tiny eyot or
islet, where the pine boughs seemed to meet high
overhead.  The hunters exchanged a shout of recognition
with its skilful rower, ere a stately heron, with grand
crimson eye and leaden wings, came slowly flapping
down the stream intent on fishing.  Then the little
party wound their way by ripple-worn rocks, covered
with mosses and lichens.  At last, on one of the few
bare spots on a distant hillside, some dark moving
specks became visible.  The hunt began in earnest.
Away went the horsemen over the wide, open plain.
Wilfred and the cart following more slowly, yet near
enough to watch the change to the stealthy approach
and the cautious outlook over the hill-top, where the
hunter's practised eye had detected the buffalo.

"Keep close by me," said Forgill to his young
companion, as they wound their way upwards, and reached
the brow of the hill just in time to watch the wild
charge upon the herd, which scattered in desperate
flight, until the hindmost turned to bay upon his
reckless pursuers, his shaggy head thrown up as he
stood for a moment at gaze.  With a whoop and a
cheer, in which Wilfred could not help joining,
Bowkett again gave chase, followed by his man Diomé.
A snap shot rattled through the air.  Forgill drew
the cart aside to the safer shelter of a wooded copse,
out of the line of the hunters.  He knew the infuriated
buffalo would shortly turn on his pursuers.  The
loose horses were racing after their companions, and
Brownie was quivering with excitement.

"Hold hard!" cried Forgill, who saw the boy was
longing to give the pony its head and follow suit.
"Quiet, my lad," he continued.  "None of us are up
to that sort of work.  It takes your breath to look
at them."

The buffalo was wheeling round.  Huge and
unwieldy as the beast appeared, it changed its front
with the rapidity of lightning.  Then Bowkett backed
his horse and fled.  On the proud beast thundered,
with lowered eyes flashing furiously under its shaggy
brows.  A bullet from Diomé's gun struck him on
the forehead.  He only shook his haughty head and
bellowed till the prairie rang; but his pace slackened
as the answering cries of the retreating herd seemed
to call him back.  He was within a yard of Bowkett's
horse, when round he swung as swiftly and suddenly
as he had advanced.  Wilfred stood up in his stirrups
to watch him galloping after his companions, through
a gap in a broken bluff at no great distance.  Away
went Bowkett and Diomé, urging on their horses
with shout and spur.

"Halt a bit," said Forgill, restraining Wilfred and
his pony, until they saw the two hunters slowly
returning over the intervening ridge with panting
horses.  They greeted the approach of the cart with
a hurrah of success, proposing, as they drew nearer,
to halt for dinner in the shelter of the gap through
which the buffalo had taken its way.

Wilfred was soon busy with Diomé gathering the
dry branches last night's wind had broken to make a
fire, whilst Bowkett and Forgill went forward with
the cart to look for the fallen quarry.

It was the boy's first lesson in camping out, and he
enjoyed it immensely, taking his turn at the frying-pan
with such success that Diomé proposed to hand
it over to his exclusive use for the rest of their
expedition.

It was hard work to keep the impudent blue jays,
with which the prairie abounded, from darting at the
savoury fry, and pecking out the very middle of the
steak, despite the near neighbourhood of smoke and
flame, which threatened to singe their wings in the
mad attempt.

But in spite of the thievish birds, dinner was eaten
and appreciated in the midst of so much laughter and
chaff that even Forgill unbent.

But a long day's work was yet before them, spurring
over the sand-ridges and through the rustling grass.
They had almost reached one of the westward jutting
spurs of the Touchwood Hills, when the sun went
down.  As it neared the earth and sank amidst the
glorious hues of emerald and gold, the dark horizon line
became visible for a few brief instants across its
blood-red face; but so distant did it seem, so very far away,
the whole scene became dreamlike from its immensity.

"We've done, my lads!" shouted Bowkett; "we
have about ended as glorious a day's sport as ever I had."

"Not yet," retorted Diomé.  "Just listen."  There
was a trampling, snorting sound as of many cattle on
the brink of a lakelet sheltering at the foot of the
neighbouring hills.

Were they not in the midst of what the early
Canadian settlers used to call the Land of the Wild
Cows?  Those sounds proceeded from another herd
coming down for its evening drink.  On they crept
with stealthy steps through bush and bulrush to get
a nearer view in the bewildering shadows, which were
growing darker and darker every moment.

"Stop! stop!" cried Forgill, hurrying forward, as
the light yet lingering on the lake showed the familiar
faces of his master's cows stooping down to reach the
pale blue water at their feet.  Yes, there they were, the
truant herd Marley was endeavouring in vain to find.

Many a horned head was lifted at the sound of
Forgill's well-known call.  Away he went into the
midst of the group, pointing out the great "A" he
had branded deep in the thick hair on the left
shoulder before he had turned them loose.

What was now to be done?

"Drive them home," said the careful Forgill, afraid
of losing them again.  But Bowkett was not willing
to return.

Meanwhile Diomé and Wilfred were busy preparing
for the night at the spot where they had halted,
when the presence of the herd was first perceived.
They had brought the horses down to the lake to water
at a sufficient distance from the cows not to disturb
them.  But one or two of the wanderers began to "moo,"
as if they partially recognized their former companions.

"They will follow me and the horses," pursued
Forgill, who knew he could guide his way across the
trackless prairie by the aid of the stars.

"If you come upon Marley," he said, "he can take
my place in the cart, for he has most likely found the
trail of the cows by this time; or if I cross his path,
I shall leave him to drive home the herd and return.
You will see one of us before morning."

"As you like," replied Bowkett, who knew he could
do without either man provided he kept the cart.
"You will probably see us back at the gate of Acland's
Hut by to-morrow night; and if we do not bring you
game enough, we must plan a second expedition when
you have more leisure."

So it was settled between them.

Forgill hurried back to the camping place to get
his supper before he started.  Bowkett lingered
behind, surveying the goodly herd, whilst vague schemes
for combining the twofold advantages of hunter and
farmer floated through his mind.

When he rejoined his companions he found them
seated round a blazing fire, enjoying the boiling
kettle of tea, the fried steak, and biscuit which
composed their supper.  The saddles were hung up on
the branches of the nearest tree, and the skins and
blankets which were to make their bed were already
spread upon the pine brush which strewed the ground.

"Now, young 'un," said Forgill solemnly, "strikes
me I had better keep you alongside anyhow."

"No, no," retorted Diomé.  "The poor little fellow
has been in the saddle all day, and he is dead asleep
already; leave him under his blankets.  He'll be right
enough; must learn to rough it sooner or later."

Forgill, who had to be his own tailor and washer-woman,
was lamenting over a rent in his sleeve, which
he was endeavouring to stitch up.  For a housewife,
with its store of needles and thread, was never absent
from his pocket.

His awkward attempts awakened the mirth of his
companions.

"What, poor old boy! haven't you got a wife at
home to do the stitching for you?" asked Diomé.

"When you have passed the last oak which grows
on this side the Red River, are there a dozen English
women in a thousand miles?" asked Forgill; and then
he added, "The few there are are mostly real ladies,
the wives of district governors and chief factors.  A
fellow must make up his mind to do for himself and
rub through as he can."

"Unless he follows my father's example," put in
Bowkett, "and chooses himself a faithful drudge from
an Indian wigwam.  He would want no other tailor
or washerwoman, for there are no such diligent
workers in the world.  Look at that," he continued,
pointing to his beautifully embroidered leggings, the
work of his Indian relations.

"Pay a visit to our hunters' winter camp," added
Diomé, "and we will show you what an old squaw
can do to make home comfortable."

There was this difference between the men: Diomé
who had been left by his French father to be brought
up by his Indian mother, resembled her in many
things; whilst Bowkett, whose father was English,
despised his Indian mother, and tried to make himself
more and more of an Englishman.  This led him to
cultivate the acquaintance with the Aclands.

"I am going to send your mistress a present," he
said, "of a mantle woven of wild dogs' hair.  It
belonged to the daughter of an Indian chief from the
Rocky Mountains.  It has a fringe a foot deep, and
is covered all over with embroidery.  You will see
then what a squaw can do."

Forgill did not seem over-pleased at this information.

"Are you talking of my Aunt Miriam?" asked
Wilfred, opening his sleepy eyes.

"So you are thinking about her," returned Forgill.
"That's right, my lad; for your aunt and uncle at
Acland's Hut are the only kith and kin you have left,
and they are quite ready to make much of you, and
you can't make too much of them."

"You have overshot the mark there," laughed
Bowkett; "rather think the missis was glad to be rid
of the young plague on any terms."

Diomé pulled the blankets over Wilfred's head, and
wished him a *bonne nuit* (good night).

When the boy roused up at last Forgill had long
since departed, and Diomé, who had been the first to
awaken, was vigorously clapping his hands to warm
them, and was shouting, "*Lève! lève! lève!*" to his
sleepy companions.

"Get up," interpreted Bowkett, who saw that
Wilfred did not understand his companion's provincial
French.  Then suiting the action to the word, he
crawled out from between the shafts of the cart, where
he had passed the night, tossed off his blankets and
gave himself a shake, dressing being no part of the
morning performances during camping out in the
Canadian wilds, as every one puts on all the clothing
he has at going to bed, to keep himself warm through
the night.

The fire was reduced to a smouldering ash-heap,
and every leaf and twig around was sparkling with
hoar-frost, for the frost had deepened in the night, and
joints were stiff and limbs were aching.  A run for a
mile was Bowkett's remedy, and a look round for the
horses, which had been turned loose, Canadian fashion,
to get their supper where they could find it.

The first red beams of the rising sun were tinging
the glassy surface of the lake when Bowkett came
upon the scattered quadrupeds, and drove them, with
Wilfred's assistance, down to its blue waters for their
morning drink.

Diomé's shouts recalled them to their own
breakfast.  He was a man of many tongues, invariably
scolding in French—especially the horses and dogs,
who heeded it, he asserted, better than any other
language except Esquimau—explaining in English,
and coming out with the Indian "Caween" when
discourse required an animated "no."  "Caween," he
reiterated now, as Bowkett asked, "Are we to dawdle
about all day for these English cow-keepers?"  For
neither Forgill nor Marley had yet put in an appearance.

The breakfast was not hurried over.  The fire was
built up bigger than ever before they left, that its
blackened remains might mark their camping place
for days, if the farming men came after them.

Wilfred, who had buckled the saddle on Brownie,
received a riding lesson, and then they started, Diomé
driving the cart.  Wilfred kept beside him at first,
but growing bolder as his spirits rose, he trotted
onward to exchange a word with Bowkett.

The sharp, frosty night seemed likely to be followed
by a day of bright and mellow sunshine.  The
exhilarating morning breeze banished all thoughts of
fear and care from the light-hearted trio; and when
the tall white stems of the pines appeared to tremble
in the mid-day mirage, Wilfred scampered hither and
thither, as merry as the little gopher, or ground
squirrel, that was gambolling across his path.  But no
large game had yet been sighted.  Then all
unexpectedly a solitary buffalo stalked majestically across
what was now the entrance to a valley, but what
would become the bed of a rushing river when the ice
was melting in the early spring.

Bowkett paused, looked to his rifle and
saddle-girths, waved his arm to Wilfred to fall back, and
with a shout that made the boy's heart leap dashed
after it.  Wilfred urged his Brownie up the bank,
where he thought he could safely watch the chase and
enjoy a repetition of the exciting scenes of yesterday.

Finding itself pursued, the buffalo doubled.  On it
came, tearing up the ground in its course, and seeming
to shake the quivering trees with its mighty bellow.
Brownie plunged and reared, and Wilfred was flung
backwards, a senseless heap at the foot of the steep bank.





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.. _`THE FIRST SNOWSTORM`:

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   CHAPTER III.


.. class:: center large bold

   *THE FIRST SNOWSTORM.*

.. vspace:: 2

IN the midst of the danger and excitement of the
chase, Bowkett had not a thought to spare for
Wilfred.  He and Diomé were far too busy to even
wonder what had become of him.  It was not until
their work was done, and the proverbial hunger of the
hunter urged them to prepare for dinner, that the
question arose.

"Where on earth is that young scoundrel of a boy?
Has he fallen back so far that it will take him all
day to recover ground?" asked Bowkett.

"And if it is so," remarked Diomé, "he has only to
give that cunning little brute its head.  It is safe to
follow the track of the cart-wheel, and bring him in
for the glorious teasing that is waiting to sugar his
tea."

"Rare seasoning for the frying-pan," retorted
Bowkett, as he lit his pipe, and proposed to halt a bit
longer until the truant turned up.

"Maybe," suggested Diomé, "if May bees fly in
October, that moose-eared pony [the long ears of the
moose detect the faintest sound at an inconceivable
distance] has been more than a match for his raw
equestrianism.  It has heard the jog-trot of that
solemn and sober cowherd, and galloped him off to
join his old companions.  What will become of the
scattered flock?"

"Without a leader," put in Bowkett.  "I have a
great mind to bid for the office."

"Oh, oh!" laughed Diomé.  "I have something of
the keen scent of my Indian grandfather; I began to
sniff the wind when that mantle was talked about
last night.  Now then, are we going to track back
to find this boy?"

"I do not know where you propose to look for
him, but I can tell you where you will find
him—munching cakes on his auntie's lap.  We may as well
save time by looking in the likeliest place first,"
retorted Bowkett.

The bivouac over, they returned to Acland's Hut
with their well-laden cart, and Wilfred was left
behind them, no one knew where.  The hunters' careless
conclusions were roughly shaken, when they saw a
riderless pony trotting leisurely after them to the
well-known door.  Old Pête came out and caught it
by the bridle.  An ever-rising wave of consternation
was spreading.  No one as yet had put it into words,
until Forgill emerged from the cattle-sheds with a
sack on his shoulder, exclaiming, "Where's the boy?"

"With you, is not he?  He did not say much to
us; either he or his pony started off to follow you.
He was an unruly one, you know," replied Bowkett.
Forgill's only answer was a hoarse shout to Marley,
who had returned from his wanderings earlier in the
day, to come with torches.  Diomé joined them in
the search.

Bowkett stepped into the house to allay Aunt
Miriam's fears with his regret the boy had somehow
given them the slip, but Forgill and Diomé had gone
back for him.

An abundant and what seemed to them a luxuriant
supper had been provided for the hunting party.
Whilst Bowkett sat down to enjoy it to his heart's
content, Aunt Miriam wandered restlessly from room
to room, cautiously breaking the ill news to her
brother, by telling him only half the hunting party
had yet turned up.  Pête was watching for the
stragglers.

He roused himself up to ask her who was missing.

But her guarded reply reassured him, and he
settled back to sleep.  Such mishaps were of
every-day occurrence.

"A cold night for camping out," he murmured.
"You will see them with the daylight."

But the chilly hour which precedes the dawn brought
with it a heavy fall of snow.

Aunt Miriam's heart sank like lead, for she knew
that every track would be obliterated now.  Bowkett
still laughed away her fears.  Find the boy they
would, benumbed perhaps at the foot of a tree, or
huddled up in some sheltering hollow.

Then Aunt Miriam asked Bowkett if he would
earn her everlasting gratitude, by taking the dogs
and Pête, with skins and blankets—

"And bringing the truant home," responded
Bowkett boastfully.

The farm-house, with its double doors and windows,
its glowing stoves in every room, was as warm and
cozy within as the night without was cheerless and
cold.  Bowkett, who had been enjoying his taste of
true English comfort, felt its allurements enhanced by
the force of the contrast.  Aunt Miriam barred the
door behind him with a great deal of unearned
gratitude in her heart.  Her confidence in Forgill was
shaken.  He ought not to have brought home the
cows and left her nephew behind.  Yet the herd was
so valuable, and he felt himself responsible to his
master for their well-being.  She did not blame
Forgill; she blamed herself for letting Wilfred go
with him.  She leaned upon the hunter's assurances,
for she knew that his resource and daring, and his
knowledge of the country, were far greater than that
possessed by either of the farming men.

The storm which had burst at daybreak had
shrouded all around in a dense white sheet of driving
snowflakes.  Even objects close at hand showed dim
and indistinct in the gray snow-light.  On the
search-party went, groping their way through little clumps
of stunted bushes, which frequently deceived them by
a fancied resemblance to a boyish figure, now
throwing up its arms to call attention, now huddled in a
darkling heap.  Their shouts received no answer:
that went for little.  The boy must long ago have
succumbed to such a night without fire or shelter
They felt among the bushes.  The wet mass of snow
struck icily cold on hands and faces.  A bitter, biting
wind swept down the river from the north-east,
breaking the tall pine branches and uprooting many
a sapling.  The two search-parties found each other
that was all.  Such weather in itself makes many a
man feel savage-tempered and sullen.  If they spoke
at all, it was to blame one another.

While thus they wandered to and fro over the
hunting-ground of yesterday, where was the boy they
failed to meet?  Where was Wilfred?  Fortunately
for him the grass grew thick and tall at the bottom
of the bank down which he had fallen.  Lost to view
amid the waving yellow tufts which had sprung up
to giant size in the bed of the dried-up stream, he lay
for some time in utter unconsciousness; whilst the
frightened pony, finding itself free, galloped madly
away over the sandy ridges they had been crossing
earlier in the morning.

By slow degrees sight and sound returned to the
luckless boy.  He was bruised and shaken, and one
ankle which he had bent under him made him cry
out with pain when he tried to rise.  At last he drew
himself into a sitting posture and looked around.
Recollections came back confusedly at first.  As his ideas
grew clearer, he began to realize what had happened.
Overhead the sky was gloomy and dark.  A stormy
wind swept the whitened grass around him into
billowy waves.  Wilfred's first thought was to shout
to his companions; but his voice was weak and faint,
and a longing for a little water overcame him.

Finding himself unable to walk, he dropped down
again in the grassy nest which he had formed for
himself, and tried to think.  The weight of his fall
had crushed the grass beneath him into the soft clayey
mud at the bottom of the valley.  But the pain in
his ankle predominated over every other consideration.
His first attempt to help himself was to take
the knife out of his belt and cut down some of the
grass within reach, and make a softer bed on which to
rest it.  His limbs were stiffening with the cold, and
whilst he had still feeling enough in his fingers to
undo his boot, he determined to try to bind up his
ankle.  Whilst he held it pressed between both his
hands it seemed easier.

But Wilfred knew he must not sit there waiting
for Forgill, who, he felt sure, would come and look
for him if he had rejoined the hunting party:
if—there were so many *ifs* clinging to every thought
Wilfred grew desperate.  He grasped a great handful
of the sticky clay and pressed it round his ankle in a
stiff, firm band.  There was a change in the
atmosphere.  In the morning that clay would have been
hard and crisp with the frost, now it was yielding
in his hand; surely the snow was coming.  Boy as
he was, he knew what that would do for him—he
should be buried beneath it in the hole in which he
lay.  It roused him to the uttermost.  Deep down in
Wilfred's nature there was a vein of that cool daring
which the great Napoleon called "two o'clock in the
morning courage"—a feeling which rises highest in
the face of danger, borrowing little from its
surroundings, and holding only to its own.

"If," repeated Wilfred, as his thoughts ran on—"if
they could not find me, and that is likely enough, am
I going to lie here and die?"

He looked up straight into the leaden sky.  "There
is nothing between us and God's heaven," he thought.
"It is we who see such a little way.  He can send me
help.  It may be coming for what I know, one way
or another.  What is the use of sitting here thinking?
Has Bowkett missed me?  Will he turn back to look
me up?  Will Forgill come?  If I fall asleep down
in this grass, how could they see me?  Any way, I
must get out of this hole."  He tore the lining out of
his cap and knotted it round his ankle, to keep the
clay in place; but to put his boot on again was an
impossibility.  Even he knew his toes would freeze
before morning if he left them uncovered.  He took
his knife and cut off the fur edge down the front of
the old skin coat, and wound his foot up in it as fast
as he could.  Then, dragging his boot along with him,
he tried hard to crawl up the bank; but it was too
steep for him, and he slipped back again, hurting
himself a little more at every slide.

This, he told himself, was most unnecessary, as he
was sore enough and stiff enough before.  Another
bad beginning.  What was the use of stopping short
at a bad beginning?  He thought of Bruce and his
spider.  He had not tried seven times yet.

Wilfred's next attempt was to crawl towards the
entrance of the valley—this was easier work.  Then
he remembered the biscuit in his pocket.  It was not
all gone yet.  He drew himself up and began to eat
it gladly enough, for he had had nothing since his
breakfast.  The biscuit was very hard, and he crunched
it, making all the noise he could.  It seemed a relief
to make any sort of sound in that awful stillness.

He was growing almost cheery as he ate.  "If I can
only find the cart-track," he thought; "and I must be
near it.  Diomé was behind us when I was thrown;
he must have driven past the end of this valley.  If
I could only climb a tree, I might see where the grass
was crushed by the cart-wheel."

But this was just what Wilfred could not do.  The
last piece of biscuit was in his hand, when a dog leaped
out of the bushes on the bank above him and flew at it.
Wilfred seized his boot to defend himself; but that was
hopeless work, crawling on the ground.  It was a better
thought to fling the biscuit to the dog, for if he
enraged it—ah! it might tear him to pieces.  It caught
the welcome boon in its teeth, and devoured it, pawing
the ground impatiently for more.  Wilfred had but
one potato left.  He began to cut it in slices and toss
them to the dog.  A bright thought had struck him:
this dog might have a master near.  No doubt about
that; and if he were only a wild Red Indian, he was
yet a man.  Full of this idea, Wilfred emptied out
his pockets to see if a corner of biscuit was left at the
bottom.  There were plenty of crumbs.  He forgot
his own hunger, and held out his hand to the dog.
It was evidently starving.  It sat down before him,
wagging its bushy tail and moving its jaws beseechingly,
in a mute appeal for food.  Wilfred drew himself
a little nearer, talking and coaxing.  One sweep of
the big tongue and the pile of crumbs had vanished.

There was a sound—a crashing, falling sound—in
the distance.  How they both listened!  Off rushed
the furry stranger.

"It is my chance," thought Wilfred, "my only chance."

He picked up the half-eaten potato and scrambled
after the dog, quite forgetting his pain in his desperation.
A vociferous barking in the distance urged him on.

It was not Bowkett, by the strange dog; but another
hunting party might be near.  The noise he had heard
was the fall of some big game.  Hope rose high; but
he soon found himself obliged to rest, and then he
shouted with all his might.  He was making his way
up the valley now.  He saw before him a clump of
willows, whose drooping boughs must have lapped the
stream.  His boot was too precious to be left behind;
he slung it to his belt, and then crawled on.  One
more effort.  He had caught the nearest bough, and,
by its help, he drew himself upright.  Oh the pain
in the poor foot when he let it touch the ground! it
made him cry out again and again.  Still he persisted
in his purpose.  He grasped a stronger stem arching
higher overhead, and swung himself clear from the
ground.  The pliant willow swayed hither and thither
in the stormy blast.  Wilfred almost lost his hold.
The evening shadows were gathering fast.  The dead
leaves swept down upon him with every gust.  The
wind wailed and sighed amongst the tall white grass
and the bulrushes at his feet.  It was impossible to
resist a feeling of utter desolation.

Wilfred shut his eyes upon the dreary scene.  The
snatch of prayer on his lips brought back the bold
spirit of an hour ago.  He rested the poor injured
ankle on his other foot, and drew himself up, hand
over hand, higher and higher, to the topmost bough,
and there he clung, until a stronger blast than ever
flung him backwards towards the bank.  He felt the
bough giving way beneath his weight, and, with a
desperate spring, clutched at the stunted bushes which
had scratched his cheek when for one moment, in the
toss of the gale, he had touched the hard, firm, stony
ridge.  Another moment, and Wilfred found himself,
gasping and breathless, on the higher ground.  An
uprooted tree came down with a shock of thunder,
shaking the earth beneath him, loosening the
water-washed stones, and crashing among the decaying
branches of its fellow pines.

At last the whirl of dust and stones subsided, and
the barking of the dog made itself heard once more
above the roar of the gale.  Trembling at his
hair-breadth escape, Wilfred cleared the dust from his eyes
and looked about him.  A dark form was lying upon
the shelving ground.  He could just distinguish the
outstretched limbs and branching antlers of a wild
moose-deer.

Whoever the hunter might be he would seek his
quarry.  Wilfred felt himself saved.  The tears swam
before his eyes.  He was looking upward in the
intensity of his thankfulness.  He did not see the arrow
quivering still in the dead deer's flank, or he would
have known that it could only have flown from some
Indian bow.

He had nothing to do but to wait, to wait and shout.
A warm touch on the tip of his ear made him look
round; the dog had returned to him.  It, too, had
been struck—a similar arrow was sticking in the back
of its neck.  It twisted its head round as far as it
was possible, vainly trying to reach it, and then looked
at Wilfred with a mute, appealing glance there was
no mistaking.  The boy sat up, laid one hand on the
dog's back, and grasped the arrow with the other.
He tugged at it with all his might; the point was
deep in the flesh.  But it came out at last, followed
by a gush of blood.

"Stand still, good dog.  There, quiet, quiet!" cried
Wilfred quickly, as he tore a bit of fur off his cap
and plugged the hole.

The poor wounded fellow seemed to understand all
about it.  He only turned his head and licked the
little bit of Wilfred's face that was just visible under
his overwhelming cap.  A doggie's gratitude is never
wanting.

"Don't, you stupid," said Wilfred.  "How am I
to see what I am about if you keep washing me
between my eyes?  There! just what I expected, it
is out again.  Now, steady."

Another try, and the plug was in again, firmer
than before.

"There, there!  lie down, and let me hold it a bit,"
continued Wilfred, carefully considering his shaggy
acquaintance.

He was a big, handsome fellow, with clean, strong
legs and a hairy coat, which hung about his keen,
bright eyes and almost concealed them.  But the fur
was worn and chafed around his neck and across his
back, leaving no doubt in Wilfred's mind as to what
he was.

"You have been driven in a sledge, old boy," he
said, as he continued to fondle him.  "You've worn
harness until it has torn your coat and made it
shabbier than mine.  You are no hunter's dog, as I
hoped.  I expect you have been overdriven, lashed
along until you dropped down in the traces; and
then your hard-hearted driver undid your harness,
and left you to live or die.  Oh!  I know their cruel
ways.  How long have you been wandering?  It
isn't in nature that I shouldn't feel for you, for I
am afraid, old fellow, I am in for such another 'do.'"

Wilfred was not talking to deaf ears.  The dog
lay down beside him, and stretched its long paws
across his knee, looking up in his face, as if a word
of kindness were something so new, so unimagined,
so utterly incomprehensible.  Was it the first he had
ever heard?

No sunset glory brightened the dreary scene.  All
around them was an ever-deepening gloom.  Wilfred
renewed his shouts at intervals, and the dog barked
as if in answer.  Then followed a long silent pause,
when Wilfred listened as if his whole soul were in
his ears.  Was there the faintest echo of a sound?
Who could distinguish in the teeth of the gale, still
tearing away the yellow leaves from the storm-tossed
branches, and scaring the wild fowl from marsh and
lakelet?  Who could tell?  And yet there was a
shadow thrown across the white pine stem.

Another desperate shout.  Wilfred's heart was in
his mouth as he strove to make himself heard above
the roar of the wind.  On came the stately figure of
a wild Cree chief.  His bow was in his hand, but
he was glancing upwards at the stormy sky.  His
stealthy movements and his light and noiseless tread
had been unheard, even by the dog.

The Indian was wearing the usual dress of the Cree—a
coat of skin with a scarlet belt, and, as the night
was cold, his raven elf-locks were covered with a
little cap his squaw had manufactured from a
rat-skin.  His blue cloth leggings and beautiful
embroidered moccasins were not so conspicuous in the
fading light.  Wilfred could but notice the fingerless
deer-skin mittens covering the hand which grasped his
bow.  His knife and axe were stuck in his belt, from
which his well-filled quiver hung.

Wilfred tumbled himself on to one knee, and holding
out the arrow he had extracted from the dog, he
pointed to the dead game on the bank.

Wilfred was more truly afraid of the wild-looking
creature before him than he would have been of the
living moose.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`MAXICA, THE CREE INDIAN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV.


.. class:: center large bold

   *MAXICA, THE CREE INDIAN.*

.. vspace:: 2

Wilfred thought his fears were only too
well-founded when he saw the Indian lay an
arrow on his bow-string and point it towards him.
He had heard that Indians shoot high.  Down he
flung himself flat on his face, exclaiming, "Spare
me! spare me!  I'm nothing but a boy."

The dog growled savagely beside him.

Despite the crash of the storm the Indian's quick
ear had detected the sound of a human voice, and his
hand was stayed.  He seemed groping about him, as
if to find the speaker.

"I am here," shouted Wilfred, "and there is the
moose your arrow has brought down."

The Indian pointed to his own swarthy face,
saying with a grave dignity, "The day has gone from
me.  I know it no longer.  In the dim, dim twilight
which comes before the night I perceive the
movement, but I no longer see the game.  Yet I shoot,
for the blind man must eat."

Wilfred turned upon his side, immensely comforted
to hear himself answered in such intelligent English.
He crawled a little nearer to the wild red man, and
surveyed him earnestly as he tried to explain the
disaster which had left him helpless in so desolate
a spot.  He knew he was in the hunting-grounds of
the Crees, one of the most friendly of the Indian
tribes.  His being there gave no offence to the blind
archer, for the Indians hold the earth is free to all.

The chief was wholly intent upon securing the
moose Wilfred had told him his arrow had brought down.

"I have missed the running stream," he went on.
"I felt the willow leaves, but the bed by which they
are growing is a grassy slope."

"How could you know it?" asked Wilfred, in astonishment.

The Indian picked up a stone and threw it over
the bank.  "Listen," he said; "no splash, no gurgle,
no water there."  He stumbled against the fallen
deer, and stooping down, felt it all over with evident
rejoicing.

He had been medicine man and interpreter for his
tribe before the blindness to which the Indians are
so subject had overwhelmed him.  It arises from the
long Canadian winter, the dazzling whiteness of the
frozen snow, over which they roam for three parts
of the year, which they only exchange for the choking
smoke that usually fills their chimneyless wig-wams.

The Cree was thinking now how best to secure his
prize.  He carefully gathered together the dry branches
the storm was breaking and tearing away in every
direction, and carefully covered it over.  Then he
took his axe from his belt and cut a gash in the bark
of the nearest tree to mark the spot.

Wilfred sat watching every movement with a nervous
excitement, which helped to keep his blood from
freezing and his heart from failing.

The dog was walking cautiously round and round
whilst this work was going forward.

The Cree turned to Wilfred.

"You are a boy of the Moka-manas?" (big knives,
an Indian name for the white men).

"Yes," answered Wilfred.

When the *cache*, as the Canadians call such a place
as the Indian was making, was finished, the darkness
of night had fallen.  Poor Wilfred sat clapping his
hands, rubbing his knees, and hugging the dog to keep
himself from freezing altogether.  He could scarcely
tell what his companion was about, but he heard the
breaking of sticks and a steady sound of chopping
and clearing.  Suddenly a bright flame shot up in the
murky midnight, and Wilfred saw before him a
well-built pyramid of logs and branches, through which
the fire was leaping and running until the whole mass
became one steady blaze.  Around the glowing heap
the Indian had cleared away the thick carpet of pine
brush and rubbish, banking it up in a circle as a
defence from the cutting wind.

He invited Wilfred to join him, as he seated himself
in front of the glowing fire, wrapped his bearskin
round him, and lit his pipe.

The whole scene around them was changed as if by
magic.  The freezing chill, the unutterable loneliness
had vanished.  The ruddy light of the fire played
and flickered among the shadowy trees, casting bright
reflections of distorted forms along the whitening
ground, and lighting up the cloudy sky with a
radiance that must have been visible for miles.
Wilfred was not slow in making his way into the charmed
circle.  He got over the ground like a worm, wriggling
himself along until his feet were over the bank, and
down he dropped in front of the glorious fire.  He coiled
himself round with a sense of exquisite enjoyment,
stretching his stiffened limbs and spreading his hands
to the glowing warmth, and altogether behaving in as
senseless a fashion as the big doggie himself.  He had
waited for no invitation, bounding up to Wilfred in
extravagant delight, and now lay rolling over and over
before the fire, giving sharp, short barks of delight at
the unexpected pleasure.

It was bliss, it was ecstasy, it was paradise, that
sudden change from the bleak, dark, shivering night
to the invigorating warmth and the cheery glow.

The Cree sat back in dreamy silence, sending great
whiffs of smoke from the carved red-stone bowl of his
long pipe, and watching the dog and the boy at play.
Their presence in noways detracted from his Indian
comfort, for the puppy and the pappoose are the
Cree's delight by his wigwam fire.

Hunger and thirst were almost forgotten, until
Wilfred remembered his potato, and began to busy
himself with roasting it in the ashes.  But the dog,
mistaking his purpose, and considering it a most
inappropriate gift to the fire, rolled it out again before
it was half roasted, and munched it up with great gusto.

"There's a shame! you bad old greedy boy,"
exclaimed Wilfred, when he found out what the dog was
eating.  "Well," he philosophised, determined to make
the best of what could not now be helped, "I had a
breakfast, and you—why, you look as if you had had
neither breakfast, dinner, nor supper for many a long
day.  How have you existed?"

But this question was answered before the night
was out.  The potato was hot, and the impatient dog
burned his lips.  After sundry shakings and rubbings
of his nose in the earth, the sagacious old fellow
jumped up the bank and ran off.  When he returned,
his tongue touched damp and cool, and there were
great drops of water hanging in his hair.  Up sprang
the thirsty Wilfred to search for the spring.  The Cree
was nodding; but the boy had no fear of losing himself,
with that glorious fire-shine shedding its radiance
far and wide through the lonely night.  He called the
dog to follow him, and groped along the edge of the
dried-up watercourse, sometimes on all fours, sometimes
trying to take a step.  Painful as it was, he was
satisfied his foot was none the worse for a little movement.
His effort was rewarded.  He caught the echo of a
trickling sound from a corner of rock jutting out of
the stunted bushes.  The dog, which seemed now to
guess the object of his search, led him up to a breakage
in the lichen-covered stone, through which a bubbling
spring dashed its warm spray into their faces.  Yes,
it was warm; and when Wilfred stooped to catch the
longed-for water in his hands, it was warm to his
lips, with a strong disagreeable taste.  No matter, it
was water; it was life.  It was more than simple
water; he had lighted on a sulphur spring.  Wilfred
drank eagerly as he felt its tonic effects fortifying him
against the benumbing cold.  For the wind seemed
cutting the skin from his face, and the snowflakes
driving before the blast were changing the dog from
black to white.

Much elated with his discovery, Wilfred returned
to the fire, where the Cree still sat in statue-like repose.

"He is fast asleep," thought Wilfred, as he got down
again as noiselessly as he could; but the Indian's sleep
was like the sleep of the wild animal.  Hearing was
scarcely closed.  He opened one eye, comprehended that
it was Wilfred returning, and shut it, undisturbed by
the whirling snow.  Wilfred set up two great pieces
of bark like a penthouse over his head, and coaxed
the dog to nestle by his side.  Sucking the tip of his
beaver-skin gloves to still the craving for his supper,
he too fell asleep, to awake shivering in the gray of
the dawn to a changing world.  Everywhere around
him there was one vast dazzling whirl of driving sleet
and dancing snow.  The fire had become a smouldering
pile, emitting a fitful visionary glow.  On every side
dim uncertain shapes loomed through the whitened
atmosphere.  A scene so weird and wild struck a chill
to his heart.  The dog moved by Wilfred's side, and
threw off something of the damp, cold weight that was
oppressing him.  He sat upright.

Maxica, or Crow's Foot—for that was the Cree's
name—was groping round and round the circle, pulling
out pieces of dead wood from under the snow to
replenish the dying fire.  But he only succeeded in
making it hiss and crackle and send up volumes of
choking smoke, instead of the cheery flames of last night.

Between the dark, suffocating cloud which hovered
over the fire and the white whirling maze beyond it,
Maxica, with his failing sight, was completely bewildered.
All tracks were long since buried and lost.  It
was equally impossible to find the footprints of Wilfred's
hunting party, or to follow his own trail back to
the birch-bark canoe which had been his home during
the brief, bright summer.  He folded his arms in
hopeless, stony despair.

"We are in for a two days' snow," he said; "if the
fire fails us and refuses to burn, we are as good as lost."

The dog leaped out of the sunken circle, half-strangled
with the smoke, and Wilfred was coughing.  One
thought possessed them both, to get back to the water.
Snow or no snow, the dog would find it.  The Cree
yielded to Wilfred's entreaty not to part company.

"I'll be eyes for both," urged the boy, "if you will
only hold my hand."

Maxica replied by catching him round the waist and
carrying him under one arm.  They were soon at the
spring.  It was gushing and bubbling through the
snow which surrounded it, hot and stinging as before.
The dog was lapping at the little rill ere it lost itself
in the all-shrouding snow.

In another minute Wilfred and the Cree were
bending down beside it.  Wilfred was guiding the
rough, red hand to the right spot; and as Maxica
drank, he snatched a drop for himself.

To linger beside it seemed to Wilfred their wisest
course, but Maxica knew the snow was falling so thick
and fast they should soon be buried beneath it.  The
dog, however, did not share in their perplexity.
Perhaps, like Maxica, he knew they must keep moving,
for he dashed through the pathless waste, barking
loudly to Wilfred to follow.

The snow was now a foot deep, at least, on the
highest ground, and Wilfred could no longer make
his way through it.  Maxica had to lift him out of it
again and again.  At last he took him on his back,
and from this unwonted elevation Wilfred commanded
a better outlook.  The dog was some way in advance,
making short bounds across the snow and leaving a
succession of holes behind him.  He at least appeared
to know where he was going, for he kept as straight
a course as if he were following some beaten path.

But Maxica knew well no such path existed.  Every
now and then they paused at one of the holes their
pioneer had made, to recover breath.

"How long will this go on?" thought Wilfred.  "If
Maxica tires and lays me down my fate is sealed."

He began to long for another draught of the warm,
sulphurous water.  But the faint hope they both
entertained, that the dog might be leading them to
some camping spot of hunter or Indian, made them
afraid to turn back.

It was past the middle of the day when Wilfred
perceived a round dark spot rising out of the snow,
towards which the dog was hurrying.  The snow
beat full in their faces, but with the eddying gusts
which almost swept them off their feet the Cree's
keen sense of smell detected a whiff of smoke.  This
urged him on.  Another and a surer sign of help at
hand—the dog had vanished.  Yet Maxica was sure
he could hear him barking wildly in the distance.
But Wilfred could no longer distinguish the round
dark spot towards which they had been hastening.
Maxica stood still in calm and proud despair.  It was
as impossible now to go, back to the *cache* of game
and the sulphur spring as it was to force his way
onward.  They had reached a snow-drift.  The soft
yielding wall of white through which he was striding
grew higher and higher.

In vain did Wilfred's eyes wander from one side to
the other.  As far as he could see the snow lay round
them, one wide, white, level sheet, in which the Cree
was standing elbow-deep.  Were they, indeed, beyond
the reach of human aid?

Wilfred was silent, hushed; but it was the hush of
secret prayer.

Suddenly Maxica exclaimed, "Can the Good Spirit
the white men talk of, can he hear us?  Will he
show us the path?"

Such a question from such wild lips, at such an
hour, how strangely it struck on Wilfred's ear.  He
had scarcely voice enough left to make himself heard,
for the storm was raging round them more fiercely
than ever.

"I was thinking of him, Maxica.  While we are
yet speaking, will he hear?"

Wilfred's words were cut short, for Maxica had
caught his foot against something buried in the snow,
and stumbled.  Wilfred was thrown forward.  The
ground seemed giving way beneath him.  He was
tumbled through the roof of the little birch-bark hut,
which they had been wandering round and round
without knowing it.  Wilfred was only aware of a
faint glimmer of light through a column of curling,
blinding smoke.  He thought he must be descending
a chimney, but his outstretched hands were already
touching the ground, and he wondered more and more
where he could have alighted.  Not so Maxica.  He
had grasped the firm pole supporting the fragile
birch-bark walls, through which Wilfred had forced
his way.  One touch was sufficient to convince him
they had groped their way to an Indian hut.  The
column of smoke rushing through the hole Wilfred
had made in his most lucky tumble told the Cree of
warmth and shelter within.

There was a scream from a feeble woman's voice,
but the exclamation was in the rich, musical dialect
of the Blackfeet, the hereditary enemies of his tribe.
In the blind warrior's mind it was a better thing to
hide himself beneath the snow and freeze to death,
than submit to the scalping-knife of a hated foe.

Out popped Wilfred's head to assure him there was
only a poor old woman inside, but she had got a fire.

The latter half of his confidences had been already
made plain by the dense smoke, which was producing
such a state of strangulation Wilfred could say no more.

But the hut was clearing; Maxica once more grasped
the nearest pole, and swung himself down.

A few words with the terrified squaw were enough
for the Cree, who knew so well the habits of their
wandering race.  The poor old creature had probably
journeyed many hundreds of miles, roaming over their
wide hunting-grounds, until she had sunk by the way,
too exhausted to proceed any further.  Then her
people had built her this little hut, lit a fire in the
hastily-piled circle of stones in the middle of it,
heaped up the dry wood on one side to feed it, placed
food and water on the other, and left her lying on
her blankets to die alone.  It was the custom of the
wild, wandering tribes.  She had accepted her fate
with Indian resignation, simply saying that her hour
had come.  But the rest she so much needed had
restored her failing powers, and whilst her stock of
food lasted she was getting better.  They had found
her gathering together the last handful of sticks to
make up the fire once more, and then she would lie
down before it and starve.  Every Indian knows
what starvation means, and few can bear it as well.
Living as they do entirely by the chase, the feast
which follows the successful hunt is too often succeeded
by a lengthy fast.  Her shaking hands were gathering
up the lumps of snow which had come down on the
pieces of the broken roof, to fill her empty kettle.

Wilfred picked up the bits of bark to which it had
been sticking, and threw them on the fire.

"My bow and quiver for a few old shreds of beaver-skin,
and we are saved," groaned the Cree, who knew
that all his garments were made from the deer.  He
felt the hem of the old squaw's tattered robe, but
beaver there was none.

"What do you want it for, Maxica?" asked Wilfred,
as he pulled off his gloves and offered them to
him.  "There is nothing about me that I would not
give you, and be only too delighted to have got it to
give, when I think how you carried me through the
snowdrift.  These are new beaver-skin; take them,
Maxica."

A smile lit up the chief's dark face as he carefully
felt the proffered gloves, and to make assurance doubly
sure added taste to touch.  Then he began to tear
them into shreds, which he directed Wilfred to drop
into the melting snow in the kettle, explaining to him
as well as he could that there was an oiliness in the
beaver-skin which never quite dried out of it, and
would boil down into a sort of soup.

"A kind of coarse isinglass, I should say," put in
Wilfred.  But the Cree knew nothing of isinglass and
its nourishing qualities; yet he knew the good of the
beaver-skin when other food had failed.  It was a
wonderful discovery to Wilfred, to think his gloves
could provide them all with a dinner; but they
required some long hours' boiling, and the fire was dying
down again for want of fuel.  Maxica ventured out to
search for driftwood under the snow.  He carefully
drew out a pole from the structure of the hut, and
using it as an alpenstock, swung himself out of the
hollow in which the hut had been built for shelter,
and where the snow had accumulated to such a depth
that it was completely buried.

Whilst he was gone Wilfred and the squaw were
beside the fire, sitting on the ground face to face,
regarding each other attentively.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`IN THE BIRCH-BARK HUT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V.


.. class:: center large bold

   *IN THE BIRCH-BARK HUT.*

.. vspace:: 2

The squaw was a very ugly woman; starvation
and old age combined had made her perfectly
hideous.  As Wilfred sat in silence watching the
simmering kettle, he thought she was the ugliest creature
he had ever seen.  Her complexion was a dark
red-brown.  Her glittering black eyes seemed to glare on
him in the darkness of the hut like a cat's.  Her
shrivelled lips showed a row of formidably long teeth,
which made Wilfred think of Little Red Ridinghood's
grandmother, and he hoped she would not pounce on
him and devour him before Maxica returned.

He wronged her shamefully, for she had been
watching his limping movements with genuine pity.
What did it matter that her gown was scant and
short, or that her leggings, which had once been of
bright-coloured cloth, curiously worked with beads,
were reduced by time to a sort of no-colour and the
tracery upon them to a dirty line?  They hid a good,
kind heart.

She loosened the English handkerchief tied over
her head, and the long, raven locks, now streaked with
white, fell over her shoulders.

She was a wild-looking being, but her awakening
glance of alertness need not have alarmed Wilfred, for
she was only intent upon dipping him a cup of water
from the steaming kettle.  She was careful to taste it
and cool it with a little of the snow still driving
through the hole in the roof, until she made it the
right degree of heat that was safest for Wilfred in his
starving, freezing condition.

"What would Aunt Miriam think if she could see
me now?" mused the boy, as he fixed his eyes on the
dying embers and turned away from the steaming cup
he longed to snatch at.

Yet when the squaw held it towards him, he put it
back with a smile, resolutely repeating "After you,"
for was she not a woman?

He made her drink.  A little greasy water, oh! how
nice!  Then he refilled the cup and took his share.

The tottering creature smoothed the blanket from
which she had risen on Wilfred's summary entrance,
and motioned to him to lie down.

"It will be all glove with us now," laughed Wilfred
to himself—"hand and glove with the Red Indians.
If any one whispered that in uncle's ear, wouldn't he
think me a queer fish!  But I owe my life to Maxica,
and I know it."

He threw himself down on the blanket, glad indeed
of the rest for his swollen ankle.  From this lowly
bed he fell to contemplating his temporary refuge.
It looked so very temporary, especially the side from
which Maxica had abstracted his alpenstock, Wilfred
began to fear the next disaster would be its downfall.
He was dozing, when a sudden noise made him start
up, in the full belief the catastrophe he had dreaded
had arrived; but it was only Maxica dropping the
firewood he had with difficulty collected through the
hole in the roof.

He called out to Wilfred that he had discovered his
atim digging in the snow at some distance.

What his atim might prove to be Wilfred could
not imagine.  He was choosing a stick from the heap
of firewood.  Balancing himself on one foot, he popped
his head through the hole to reconnoitre.  He fancied
he too could see a moving speck in the distance.

"The dog!" he cried joyfully, giving a long, shrill
whistle that brought it bounding over the crisping
snow towards him with a ptarmigan in its mouth.

After much coaxing, Wilfred induced the dog to
lay the bird down, to lap the melting snow which was
filling the hollows in the floor with little puddles.

The squaw pounced upon the bird as a welcome
addition to the beaver-skin soup.  Where had the dog
found it?  He had not killed it, that was clear, for it
was frozen hard.  Yet it had not been frozen to death.
The quick Indian perception of the squaw pointed to
the bite on its breast.  It was not the tooth of a dog,
but the sharp beak of some bird of prey which had
killed it.  The atim had found the *cache* of a great
white owl; a provident bird, which, when once its
hunger is satisfied, stores the remainder of its prey in
some handy crevice.

The snow had ceased to fall.  The moon was rising.
The thick white carpet which covered all around was
hardening under the touch of the coming frost.

Another cup from the half-made soup, and Maxica
proposed to start with Wilfred to search for the
supposed store.  The dog was no longer hungry.  It had
stretched itself on the ground at Wilfred's feet for a
comfortable slumber.

An Indian never stops for pain or illness.  With
the grasp of death upon him, he will follow the
war-path or the hunting track, so that Maxica paid no
regard to Wilfred's swollen foot.  If the boy could
not walk, his shoulder was ready, but go he must;
the atim would lead his own master to the spot, but
it would never show it to a stranger.

Wilfred glanced up quickly, and then looked down
with a nod to himself.  It would not do to make
much of his hurt in such company.  Well, he had
added a word to his limited stock of Indian.  "Atim"
was Cree for dog, that at least was clear; and they
had added the atim to his slender possessions.  They
thought the dog was his own, and why should not he
adopt him?  They were both lost, they might as well
be chums.

This conclusion arrived at, Wilfred caught up the
wing of the ptarmigan, and showing it to the dog
did his best to incite him to find another.  He caught
sight of a long strip of moose-skin which had evidently
tied up the squaw's blanket on her journey.  He
persuaded her to lend it to him, making more use of signs
than of words.

"Ugh! ugh!" she replied, and her "yes" was as
intelligible to Wilfred as Diomé's "caween."  He soon
found that "yes" and "no" alone can go a good way
in making our wants understood by any one as
naturally quick and observant as an Indian.

The squaw saw what Wilfred was trying to do,
and helped him, feeble as she was, to make a sling
for his foot.  With the stick in his hand, when this
was accomplished, he managed to hobble after Maxica
and the dog.

The Cree went first, treading down a path, and
partially clearing the way before him with his pole.
But a disappointment awaited them.  The dog led
them intelligently enough to the very spot where it
had unquestionably found a most abundant dinner, by
the bones and feathers still sticking in the snow.
Maxica, guided by his long experience, felt about
him until he found two rats, still wedged in a hole in
a decaying tree which had gone down before the gale.
But he would not take them, for fear the owl might
abandon her reserve.

"The otowuck-oho," said Maxica, mimicking the
cry of the formidable bird, "will fill it again before
the dawn.  Wait and watch.  Maxica have the
otowuck himself.  See!"

With all the skill of the Indian at constructing
traps, he began his work, intending to catch the
feathered Nimrod by one leg the next time it visited
its larder, when all in a moment an alarm was
sounded—a cry that rent the air, so hoarse, so
hollow, and so solemn Wilfred clung to his guide
in the chill of fear.  It was a call that might have
roused to action a whole garrison of soldiers.  The
Indian drew back.  Again that dread "Waugh O!" rang
out, and then the breathless silence which followed
was broken by half-suppressed screams, as of some
one suffocating in the throttling grasp of an enemy.

The dog, with his tail between his legs, crouched
cowering at their feet.

"The Blackfeet are upon us," whispered the Cree,
with his hand on his bow, when a moving shadow
became visible above the distant pine trees.

The Cree breathed freely, and drew aside his
half-made trap, abandoned at the first word that broke
from Wilfred's lips: "It is not human; it is coming
through the air."

"It is the otowuck itself," answered Maxica.  "Be
off, or it will have our eyes out if it finds us near its
roost."

He was looking round him for some place of
concealment.  On came the dreaded creature, sailing in
rapid silence towards its favourite haunt, gliding
with outstretched pinions over the glistening snow,
its great round eyes flashing like stars, or gleams of
angry lightning, as it swept the whitened earth, shooting
downwards to strike at some furry prey, then rising
as suddenly in the clear, calm night, until it floated like
a fleecy cloud above their heads, as ready to swoop
upon the sparrow nestling on its tiny twig as upon
the wild turkey-hen roosting among the stunted bushes.

Maxica trembled for the dog, for he knew the
special hatred with which it regarded dogs.  If it
recognized the thief at its hoard, its doom was sealed.

Maxica pushed his alpenstock into an empty badger
hole big enough for the boy and dog to creep into.
Then, as the owl drew near, he sent an arrow whizzing
through the air.  It was aimed at the big white breast,
but the unerring precision of other days was over.  It
struck the feathery wing.  The bird soared aloft
unharmed, and the archer, crouching in the snow,
barely escaped its vengeance.  Down it pounced,
striking its talons in his shoulder, as he turned his
back towards it to protect his face.  Wilfred sprang
out of the friendly burrow, snatched the pole from
Maxica's hand, and beat off the owl; and the dog,
unable to rush past Wilfred, barked furiously.  The
onslaught and the noise were at least distasteful.
Hissing fiercely, with the horn-like feathers above
its glaring eyes erect and bristling, the bird spread
its gigantic wings, wheeling slowly and gracefully
above their ambush; for Wilfred had retreated as
quickly as he had emerged, and Maxica lay on his
face as still as death.  More attractive game presented
itself.  A hawk flew past.  What hawk could resist
the pleasure of a passing pounce?  Away went the
two, chasing and fighting, across the snowy waste.

.. _`Wilfred sprang and beat off the owl.`:

.. figure:: images/img-068.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: Wilfred sprang and beat off the owl.

   Wilfred sprang and beat off the owl.

When the owl was out of sight, the Cree rose
to his feet to complete the snare.  Wilfred crept out
of his burrow, to find his fingers as hard and white
and useless as if they had turned to stone.  He had
kept his gloveless hands well cuddled up in the long
sleeves of his coat during the walk, but their
exposure to the cold when he struck at the owl had
changed them to a lump of ice.

Maxica heard the exclamation, "Oh, my hands! my
hands!" and seizing a great lump of snow began
to rub them vigorously.

The return to the hut was easier than the
outgoing, for the snow was harder.  The pain in
Wilfred's fingers was turning him sick and faint as they
reached the hut a little past midnight.

The gloves were reduced to jelly, but the state of
Wilfred's hands troubled the old squaw.  She had
had her supper from the beaver-skin soup, but was
quite ready, Indian fashion, to begin again.

The three seated themselves on the floor, and the
cup was passed from one to the other, until the whole
of the soup was drank.

The walk had been fruitless, as Wilfred said.  They
had returned with nothing but the key of the big
owl's larder, which, after such an encounter, it would
probably desert.

The Cree lit his pipe, the squaw lay down to
sleep, and Wilfred talked to his dog.

"Do you understand our bargain, old fellow?" he
asked.  "You and I are going to chum together.
Now it is clear I must give you a name.  Let us see
which you will like best."

Wilfred ran through a somewhat lengthy list, for
nowhere but in Canada are dogs accommodated with
such an endless variety.  There are names in constant
use from every Indian dialect, but of the Atims and
the Chistlis the big, old fellow took no heed.  He
sat up before his new master, looking very sagacious,
as if he quite entered into the important business of
choosing a name.  But clearly Indian would not do.
even Mist-atim, which Wilfred could now interpret as
"big dog,"—a name the Cree usually bestows upon
his horse,—was heard with a contemptuous
"Ach!"  Chistli, "seven dogs" in the Sircie dialect, which
appeared to Wilfred highly complimentary to his furry
friend, met with no recognition.  Then he went over
the Spankers and Ponys and Boxers, to which the
numerous hauling dogs so often responded.  No better
success.  The pricked ears were more erect than ever.
The head was turned away in positive indifference.

"Are you a Frenchman?" asked Wilfred, going
over all the old French names he could remember.
Diomé thought the dogs had a special partiality for
French.  It would not do, however.  This particular
dog might hate it.  There were Yankee names
in plenty from over the border, and uncouth sounding
Esquimau from the far north.

Wilfred began to question if his dog had ever had
a name, when Yula caught his ear, and "Yula chummie"
brought the big shaggy head rubbing on Wilfred's
knee.  Few dogs are honoured with the choice of their
own name, but it answered, and "Yula chummie"
was adhered to by boy and dog.

This weighty matter settled, Wilfred was startled
to see Maxica rouse himself up with a shake, and
look to the man-hole, as the Cree called their place of
exit.  He was going.  Wilfred sprang up in alarm.

"Don't leave me!" he entreated.  "How shall I ever
find my way home without you?"

It might be four o'clock, for the east was not yet
gray, and the morning stars shone brightly on the
glistening snow.  Maxica paused, regarding earth and
sky attentively, until he had ascertained the way of
the wind.  It was still blowing from the north-east.
More snow was surely coming.  His care was for his
canoe, which he had left in safe mooring by the river
bank.  No one but an Indian could have hoped, in
his forlorn condition, to have recovered the lost path
to the running stream.  His one idea was to grope
about until he did find it, with the wonderful
persistency of his race.  The Indian rarely fails in anything
he sets his mind to accomplish.  But to take the lame
boy with him was out of the question.  He might
have many miles to traverse before he reached the
spot.  He tried to explain to Wilfred that he must
now pack up his canoe for the winter.  He was going
to turn it keel upwards, among the branches of some
strong tree, and cover it with boughs, until the spring
of the leaf came round again.

"Will it be safe?" asked Wilfred.

"Safe! perfectly."

Maxica's own particular mark was on boat and
paddle.  No Indian, no hunter would touch it.  Who
else was there in that wide, lone land?  As for
Wilfred, his own people would come and look for him,
now the storm was over.

"I am not so sure of that," said the poor boy sadly,
remembering Bowkett's words.—"My aunt Miriam
did not take to me.  She may not trouble herself
about me.  How could I be so stupid as to set her
against me," he was thinking, "all for nothing?"

"Then," urged Maxica, "stay here with the
Far-off-Dawn"—for that was the old squaw's name.  In his
Indian tongue he called her Pe-na-Koam.  "Will not
the Good Spirit take care of you?  Did not he guide
us out of the snowdrift?"

Wilfred was silenced.  "I never did think much
of myself," he said at last, "but I believe I grow worse
and worse.  How is it that I know and don't know—that
I cannot realize this love that never will forsake;
always more ready to hear than we to ask?  If I
could but feel it true, all true for me, I should not be
afraid."

Under that longing the trust was growing stronger
and stronger in his heart.

"I shall come again for the moose," said Maxica, as
he shook the red and aching fingers which just peeped
out from Wilfred's long sleeve; and so he left him.

The boy watched the Indian's lithe figure striding
across the snow, until he could see him no longer.
Then a cold, dreary feeling crept over him.  Was
he abandoned by all the world—forgotten—disliked?
Did nobody care for him?  He tucked his hands into
the warm fur which folded over his breast, and tried
to throw off the fear.  The tears gushed from his
eyes.  Well, there was nobody to see.

He had forgotten Yula.  Those unwonted raindrops
had brought him, wondering and troubled, to
Wilfred's side.  A big head was poking its way under
his arm, and two strong paws were brushing at his knee.
Yula was saying, "Don't, don't cry," in every variety
of doggie language.  Never had he been so loving, so
comforting, so warm to hug, so quick to understand.
He was doing his best to melt the heavy heart's lead
that was weighing poor Wilfred down.

He built up the fire, and knelt before it, with Yula's
head on his shoulder; for the cold grew sharper in
the gray of the dawn.  The squaw, now the pangs of
hunger were so far appeased, was sleeping heavily.
But there was no sleep for Wilfred.  As the daylight
grew stronger he went again to his look-out.  His
thoughts were turning to Forgill.  He had seen so
much more of Forgill than of any one else at his
uncle's, and he had been so careful over him on the
journey.  It was wrong to think they would all forget
him.  He would trust and hope.

He filled the kettle with fresh snow, and put it on
to boil.

The sun was streaming through the hole in the roof
when the squaw awoke, like another creature, but not
in the least surprised to find Maxica had departed.
She seemed thankful to see the fire still burning, and
poured out her gratitude to Wilfred.  Her smiles and
gestures gave the meaning of the words he did not
understand.

Then he asked himself, "What would have become
of her if he too had gone away with Maxica?"

She looked pityingly at Wilfred's unfortunate fingers
as he offered her a cup of hot water, their sole
breakfast.  But they could not live on hot water.  Where
was the daily bread to come from for them both?
Pe-na-Koam was making signs.  Could Wilfred set a
trap?  Alas! he knew nothing of the Indian traps
and snares.  He sent out Yula to forage for himself,
hoping he might bring them back a bird, as he had
done the night before.  Wilfred lingered by the hole
in the roof, watching him dashing through the snow,
and casting many a wistful glance to the far-away
south, almost expecting to see Forgill's fur cap and
broad capote advancing towards him; for help would
surely come.  But there are the slow, still hours, as
well as the sudden bursts of storm and sunshine.  All
have their share in the making of a brave and
constant spirit.  God's time is not our time, as Wilfred
had yet to learn.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SEARCHING FOR A SUPPER`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI.


.. class:: center large bold

   *SEARCHING FOR A SUPPER.*

.. vspace:: 2

Pe-na-Koam insisted upon examining Wilfred's
hands and feet, and tending to them after her
native fashion.  She would not suffer him to leave the
hut, but ventured out herself, for the storm was
followed by a day of glorious sunshine.  She returned
with her lap full of a peculiar kind of moss, which
she had scraped from under the snow.  In her hand
she carried a bunch of fine brown fibres.

"Wattape!" she exclaimed, holding them up before
him, with such evident pleasure he thought it was
something to eat; but no, the moss went into the
kettle to boil for dinner, but the wattape was laid
carefully aside.

The squaw had been used to toil from morning to
night, doing all the work of her little world, whilst
her warrior, when under shelter, slept or smoked by
the fire.  She expected no help from Wilfred within
the hut, but she wanted to incite him to go and hunt.
She took a sharp-pointed stick and drew a bow and
arrow on the floor.  Then she made sundry figures.
which he took for traps; but he could only shake his
head.  He was thinking of a visit to the owl's tree.
But when they had eaten the moss, Pe-na-Koam drew
out a piece of skin from under her blanket, and spreading
it on the floor laid her fingers beseechingly on his
hunting-knife.  With this she cut him out a pair of
gloves, fingerless it is true, shaped like a baby's first
glove, but oh! so warm.  Wilfred now discovered the
use of the wattape, as she drew out one long thread
after another, and began to sew the gloves together
with it, pricking the holes through which she passed
it with a quill she produced from some part of her dress.

Wilfred took up the brown tangle and examined it
closely.  It had been torn from the fine fibrous root
of the pine.  He stood still to watch her, wondering
whether there was anything he could do.  He took
the stick she had used and drew the rough figure of
a man fishing on the earthen floor.  He felt sure they
must be near some stream or lakelet.  The Indians
would never have left her beyond the reach of water.
The wrinkled face lit up with hopeful smiles.  Away
she worked more diligently than ever.

Wilfred built up the fire to give her a better blaze.
They had wood enough to last them through to-morrow.
Before it was all burnt up he must try to get
in some more.  The use was returning to his hands.
He took up some of the soft mud, made by the melting
of the snow on the earthen floor, and tried to stop
up the cracks in the bark which formed the walls of
the hut.

They both worked on in silence, hour after hour,
as if there were not a moment to lose.  At last the
gloves were finished.  The Far-off-Dawn considered
her blanket, and decided a piece might be spared off
every corner.  Out of these she cut a pair of socks.
The Indians themselves often wear three or four pairs
of such blanket socks at once in the very coldest of
the weather.  But Wilfred could find nothing in the
hut out of which to make a fishing line.  The only
thing he could do was to pay a visit to the white
owl's larder.  He was afraid to touch Maxica's trap.
He did not think he could manage it.  Poor boy, his
spirit was failing him for want of food.  Yet he
determined to go and see if there was anything to be
found.  Wilfred got up with an air of resolution, and
began to arrange the sling for his foot.  But the
Far-off-Dawn soon made him understand he must not go
without his socks, which she was hurrying to finish.

"I believe I am changing into a snail," thought
Wilfred; "I do nothing but crawl about.  Yet twenty slips
brought the snail to the top of his wall.  Twenty slips
and twenty climbs—that is something to think of."

The moon was rising.  The owl would leave her
haunt to seek for prey.

"Now it strikes me," exclaimed Wilfred, "why
she always perches on a leafless tree.  Her blinking
eyes are dazzled by the flicker of the leaves: but they
are nearly gone now, she will have a good choice.
She may not go far a-field, if she does forsake her
last night's roost."  This reflection was wondrously
consolatory.

The squaw had kept her kettle filled with melting
snow all day, so that they could both have a cup of
hot water whenever they liked.  The Far-off-Dawn was
as anxious to equip him for his foraging expedition
as he was to take it.  The socks were finished; she
had worked hard, and Wilfred knew it.  He began
to think there was something encouraging in her
very name—the Far-off-Dawn.  Was it not what
they were waiting for?  It was an earnest that their
night would end.

She made him put both the blanket socks on the
swollen foot, and then persuaded him to exchange his
boots for her moccasins, which were a much better
protection against the snow.  The strip of fur, no
longer needed to protect his toes, was wound round
and round his wrists.

Then the squaw folded her blanket over his shoulder,
and started him, pointing out as well as she could
the streamlet and the pool which had supplied her
with water when she was strong enough to fetch it.

Both knew their lives depended upon his success.
Yula was by his side.  Wilfred turned back with a
great piece of bark, to cover up the hole in the roof
of the hut to keep the squaw warm.  She had wrapped
the skin over her feet and was lying before the fire,
trying to sleep in her dumb despair.  She had
discovered there was no line and hook forthcoming from
any one of his many pockets.  How then could he
catch the fish with which she knew the Canadian
waters everywhere abounded?

Pe-na-Koam had pointed out the place of the pool
so earnestly that Wilfred thought, "I will go there
first; perhaps it was there she found the moss."

The northern lights were flashing overhead, shooting
long lines of roseate glory towards the zenith, as
if some unseen angel's hand were stringing heaven's
own harp.  But the full chord which flowed beneath
its touch was light instead of music.

Wilfred stood silent, rapt in admiring wonder, as
he gazed upon those glowing splendours, forgetting
everything beside.  Yula recalled him to the work in
hand.  He hobbled on as fast as he could.  He was
drawing near the pool, for tall rushes bent and
shivered above the all-covering snow, and pines and
willows rocked in the night wind overhead.  Another
wary step, and the pool lay stretched before him like
a silver shield.

A colony of beavers had made their home in this
quiet spot, building their mounds of earth like a
dam across the water.  But the busy workers were
all settling within doors to their winter
sleep—drawbridges drawn up, and gates barred against
intruders.  "You are wiseheads," thought Wilfred, "and
I almost wish I could do the same—work all summer
like bees, and sleep all winter like dormice; but
then the winter is so long."

"Would not it be a grand thing to take home a
beaver, Yula?" he exclaimed, suddenly remembering
his gloves in their late reduced condition, and
longing for another cup of the unpalatable soup; for the
keen air sharpened the keener appetite, until he felt
as if he could have eaten the said gloves, boiled or
unboiled.

But how to get at the clever sleepers under their
well-built dome was the difficulty, almost the
impossibility.

"Yula, it can't be done—that is by you and me, old
boy," he sighed.  "We have not got their house-door
key for certain.  We shall have to put up with the
moss, and think ourselves lucky if we find it."

The edge of the pool was already fringed with ice,
and many a shallow basin where it had overflowed
its banks was already frozen over.  Wilfred was
brushing away the crisp snow in his search for moss,
when he caught sight of a big white fish, made
prisoner by the ice in an awkward corner, where the
rising flood had one day scooped a tiny reservoir.
Making Yula sit down in peace and quietness, and
remember manners, he set to work.  He soon broke
the ice with a blow from the handle of his knife, and
took out the fish.  As he expected, the hungry dog
stood ready to devour it; but Wilfred, suspecting his
intention, tied it up in the blanket, and swung it
over his shoulder.  Fortune did not favour him with
such another find, although he searched about the
edge of the lake until it grew so slippery he was
afraid of falling in.  He had now to retrace his steps,
following the marks in the snow back to the hut.

The joy of Pe-na-Koam was unbounded when he
untied the blanket and slid the fish into her hands.

The prospect of the hot supper it would provide
for them nerved Wilfred to go a little further and
try to reach the big owl's roost, for fear another
snow should bury the path Maxica had made to it.
Once lost he might never find it again.  The owl
was still their most trusty friend and most formidable
foe.  Thanks to the kindly labours of Maxica's
pole, Wilfred could trudge along much faster now;
but before he reached the hollow tree, strange noises
broke the all-pervading stillness.  There was a
barking of dogs in the distance, to which Yula replied
with all the energy in his nature.  There was a
tramping as of many feet, and of horses, coming
nearer and nearer with a lumbering thud on the
ground, deadened and muffled by the snow, but far
too plain not to attract all Wilfred's attention.

There was a confusion of sounds, as of a concourse
of people; too many for a party of hunters, unless
the winter camp of which Diomé had spoken was
assembling.  Oh joy! if this could be.  Wilfred was
working himself into a state of excitement scarcely
less than Yula's.

He hurried on to the roosting-tree, for it carried
him nearer still to the trampling and the hum.

What could it mean?  Yula was before him, paws
up, climbing the old dead trunk, bent still lower by
the recent storm.  A snatch, and he had something
out of that hole in the riven bark.  Wilfred scrambled
on, for fear his dog should forestall him.  The night
was clear around him, he saw the aurora flashes come
and go.  Yula had lain down at the foot of the tree,
devouring his prize.  Wilfred's hand, fumbling in its
fingerless gloves, at last found the welcome hole.  It
was full once more.  Soft feathers and furs: a
gopher—the small ground squirrel—crammed against
some little snow-birds.

Wilfred gave the squirrel to his dog, for he had
many fears the squaw would be unwilling to give
him anything but water in their dearth of food.  The
snow-birds he transferred to his pocket, looking
nervously round as he did so; but there was no owl in
sight.  The white breasts of the snow-birds were
round and plump; but they were little things, not
much bigger than sparrows, and remembering Maxica's
caution, he dare not take them all.

His hand went lower: a few mice—he could leave
them behind him without any reluctance.  But stop, he
had not got to the bottom yet.  Better than ever: he
had felt the webbed feet of a wild duck.  Mrs. Owl
was nearly forgiven the awful scare of the preceding
night.  Growing bolder in his elation, Wilfred
seated himself on the roots of the tree, from which
Yula's ascent had cleared the snow.  He began to
prepare his game, putting back the skin and feathers
to conceal his depredations from the savage tenant,
lest she should change her domicile altogether.

"I hope she can't count," said Wilfred, who knew
not how to leave the spot without ascertaining the
cause of the sounds, which kept him vibrating between
hope and fear.

Suddenly Yula sprang forward with a bound and
rushed over the snow-covered waste with frantic fury.

"The Blackfeet! the Blackfeet!" gasped Wilfred,
dropping like lightning into the badger hole where
Maxica had hidden him from the owl's vengeance.
A singular cavalcade came in sight: forty or fifty
Indian warriors, armed with their bows and guns
and scalping-knives, the chiefs with their eagles'
feathers nodding as they marched.  Behind them
trotted a still greater number of ponies, on which
their squaws were riding man fashion, each with her
pappoose or baby tucked up as warm as it could be
in its deer-skin, and strapped safely to its wooden
cradle, which its mother carried on her back.

Every pony was dragging after it what the Indians
call a travoy—that is, two fir poles, the thin ends of
which are harnessed to the pony's shoulders, while
the butt ends drag on the ground; another piece of
wood is fastened across them, making a sort of truck,
on which the skins and household goods are piled.
The bigger children were seated on the top of many
a well-laden travoy, so that the squaws came on but slowly.

Wilfred was right in his conjecture: they were the
Blackfeet Maxica feared to encounter, coming up to
trade with the nearest Hudson Bay Company's fort.
They were bringing piles of furs and robes of skin,
and bags of pemmican, to exchange for shot and
blankets, sugar and tea, beads, and such other things as
Indians desire to possess.  They always came up in
large parties, because they were crossing the
hunting-grounds of their enemies the Crees.  They had a
numerous following of dogs, and many a family of
squalling puppies, on the children's laps.

The grave, stern, savage aspect of the men, the
ugly, anxious, careworn faces of the toiling women,
filled Wilfred with alarm.  Maxica in his semi-blindness
might well fear to be the one against so many.
Wilfred dared not even call back Yula, for fear of
attracting their attention.  They were passing on to
encamp by the pool he had just quitted.  Friendly
or unfriendly, Yula was barking and snarling in the
midst of the new-comers.

"Was his Yula, his Yula chummie, going to leave
him?" asked Wilfred in his dismay.  "What if he
had belonged originally to this roving tribe, and they
should take him away!"  This thought cut deeper into
Wilfred's heart than anything else at that moment.
He crept out of his badger hole, and crawled along
the ditch-like path, afraid to show his head above the
snow, and still more afraid to remain where he was,
for fear of the owl's return.

He kept up a hope that Yula might come back of
his own accord.  He was soon at the birch-bark hut,
but no Yula had turned up.

He tumbled in, breathless and panting.  Pe-na-Koam
was sure he had been frightened, but thought only of
the owl.  She had run a stick through the tail of
the fish, and was broiling it in the front of the fire.
The cheery light flickered and danced along the
misshapen walls, which seemed to lean more and more
each day from the pressure of the snow outside them.

"The blessed snow!" exclaimed Wilfred.  "It hides
us so completely no one can see there is a hut at all,
unless the smoke betrays us."

How was he to make the squaw understand the
dreaded Blackfeet were here?  He snatched up their
drawing stick, as he called it, and began to sketch in
a rough and rapid fashion the moving Indian camp
which he had seen.  A man with a bow in his hand,
with a succession of strokes behind him to denote his
following, and a horse's head with the poles of the
travoy, were quite sufficient to enlighten the aged
woman.  She grasped Wilfred's hand and shook it.
Then she raised her other arm, as if to strike, and
looked inquiringly in his face.  Friend or foe?  That
was the all-important question neither could answer.

Before he returned his moccasins to their rightful
owner, Wilfred limped out of the hut and hung up
the contents of his blanket game-bag in the nearest
pine.  They were already frozen.

Not knowing what might happen if their refuge
were discovered, they seated themselves before the
fire to enjoy the supper Wilfred had secured.  The
fish was nearly the size of a salmon trout.  The squaw
removed the sticks from which it depended a little
further from the scorch of the fire, and fell to—pulling
off the fish in flakes from one side of the backbone,
and signing to Wilfred to help himself in similar
fashion from the other.

"Fingers were made before forks," thought the
boy, his hunger overcoming all reluctance to satisfy
it in such a heathenish way.  But the old squaw's
brow was clouded and her thoughts were troubled.
She was trembling for Wilfred's safety.

She knew by the number of dashes on the floor
the party was large—a band of her own people;
no other tribe journeyed as they did, moving the
whole camp at once.  Other camps dispersed, not more
than a dozen families keeping together.

If they took the boy for a Cree or the friend of a
Cree, they would count him an enemy.  Before the
fish had vanished her plan was made.

She brought Wilfred his boots, and took back her
moccasins.  As the boy pulled off the soft skin sock,
which drew to the shape of his foot without any
pressure that could hurt his sprain, feeling far more
like a glove than a shoe, he wondered at the skill
which had made it.  He held it to the fire to examine
the beautiful silk embroidery on the legging attached
to it.  His respect for his companion was considerably
increased.  It was difficult to believe that beads and
dyed porcupine quills and bright-coloured skeins of
silk had been the delight of her life.  But just now
she was intent upon getting possession of his
hunting-knife.  With this she began to cut up the firewood
into chips and shavings.  Wilfred thought he should
be the best at that sort of work, and went to her help,
not knowing what she intended to do with it.

In her nervous haste she seemed at first glad of his
assistance.  Then she pulled the wood out of his hand,
stuck the knife in his belt, and implored him by
gestures to sit down in a hole in the floor close against
the wall, talking to him rapidly in her soft Indian
tongue, as if she were entreating him to be patient.

Wilfred thought this was a queer kind of game,
which he did not half like, and had a good mind to
turn crusty.  But the tears came into her aged eyes.
She clasped her hands imploringly, kissed him on both
cheeks, as if to assure him of her good intentions,
looked to the door, and laid a finger on his lips
impressively.  In the midst of this pantomime it struck
Wilfred suddenly "she wants to hide me."  Soon the
billet stack was built over him with careful skill, and
the chips and shavings flung on the top.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`FOLLOWING THE BLACKFEET`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VII.


.. class:: center large bold

   *FOLLOWING THE BLACKFEET.*

.. vspace:: 2

There was many a little loophole in Wilfred's
hiding-place through which he could take a
peep unseen.  The squaw had let the fire die down
to a smouldering heap, and this she had carefully
covered over with bark, so that there was neither
spark nor flame to shine through the broken roof.
The hut was unusually clear of smoke, and all was
still.

Wilfred was soon nodding dangerously behind his
billet-stack, forgetting in his drowsy musings the
instability of his surroundings.  The squaw rose up
from the floor, and replaced the knot of wood he had
sent rolling.  He dreamed of Yula's bark in the
distance, and wakened to find the noise a reality, but
not the bark.  It was not his Yula wanting to be let
in, as he imagined, but a confused medley of sounds
suggestive of the putting up of tent poles.  There
was the ring of the hatchet among the trees, the crash
of the breaking boughs, the thud of the falling trunk.
Even Wilfred could not entertain a doubt that the
Blackfeet were encamping for the night alarmingly near
their buried hut.  In silence and darkness was their
only safeguard.  It was all for the best Yula had run
away, his uneasy growls would have betrayed them.

Midnight came and passed; the sounds of work had
ceased, but the galloping of the ponies, released from
the travoys, the scraping of their hoofs seeking a
supper beneath the snow, kept Wilfred on the rack.
The echo of the ponies' feet seemed at times so near
he quite expected to see a horse's head looking down
through the hole, or, worse still, some unwary kick
might demolish their fragile roof altogether.

With the gray of the dawn the snow began again
to fall.  Was ever snow more welcome?  The heavy
flakes beat back the feeble column of smoke, and
hissed on the smouldering wood, as they found ready
entrance through the parting in the bark which did
duty for a chimney.  No matter, it was filling up the
path which Maxica had made and obliterating every
footprint around the hut.  It seemed to Wilfred that
the great feathery flakes were covering all above them,
like a sheltering wing.

The tell-tale duck, the little snow-birds he had
hung on the pine branch would all be hidden now.
Not a chink was left in the bark through which
the gray snow-light of the wintry morning could
penetrate.

In spite of their anxiety, both the anxious watchers
had fallen asleep.  The squaw was the first to rouse.
Wilfred's temporary trap-door refused to move when,
finding all was still around them, she had tried to
push it aside; for the hut was stifling, and she wanted
snow to refill the kettle.

The fire was out, and the snow which had
extinguished it was already stiffening.  She took a
half-burnt brand from the hearth, and, mounting the
stones which surrounded the fireplace, opened the
smoke-vent; for there the snow had not had time to
harden, although the frost was setting in with the
daylight.  To get out of their hut in another hour
might be impossible.  With last night's supper, a
spark of her former energy had returned.  A piece of
the smoke-dried bark gave way and precipitated an
avalanche of snow into the tiny hut.

Wilfred wakened with a start.  The daylight was
streaming down upon him, and the squaw was gone.
What could have happened while he slept?  How he
blamed himself for going to sleep at all.  But then he
could not live without it.  As he wondered and waited
and reasoned with himself thus, there was still the
faint hope the squaw might return.  Anyhow, Wilfred
thought it was the wisest thing he could do to remain
concealed where she had left him.  If the Indians
camping by the pool were her own people, they might
befriend him too.  Possibly she had gone over to
their camp to ask for aid.

How long he waited he could not tell—it seemed an
age—when he heard the joyful sound of Yula's bark.
Down leaped the dog into the very midst of the
fireplace, scattering the ashes, and bringing with him
another avalanche of snow.  But his exuberant joy
was turned to desperation when he could not find his
Wilfred.  He was rushing round and round, scenting
the ground where Wilfred had sat.  Up went his
head high in the air, as he gave vent to his feelings
in a perfect yowl of despair.

"Yula!  Yula!" called Wilfred softly.  The dog
turned round and tore at the billet-stack.  Wilfred's
defence was levelled in a moment; the wood went
rolling in every direction, and Yula mounted the
breach in triumph, digging out his master from the
debris as a dog might dig out a fox.  He would have
him out, he would not give up.  He tugged at Wilfred's
arms, he butted his head under his knees; there
was no resisting his impetuosity, he made him stand
upright.  When, as Yula evidently believed, he had
set his master free, he bounded round him in an
ecstasy of delight.

"You've done it, old boy," said Wilfred.  "You've
got me out of hiding; and neither you nor I can pile
the wood over me again, so now, whatever comes, we
must face it together."

He clasped his arms round the thick tangle of hair
that almost hid the two bright eyes, so full of love,
that were gazing at him.

Wilfred could not help kissing the dear old
blunderer, as he called him.  "And now, Yula," he
went on, "since you will have it so, we'll look about us."

Wilfred's foot was a good deal better.  He could
put his boot on for the first time.  He mounted the
stones which the squaw had piled, and listened.  Yes,
there were voices and laughter mingling with the
neighing of the ponies and the lumbering sounds of
the travoys.  The camp was moving on.  The
"Far-off-Dawn" was further off than ever from him.  He
had no longer a doubt the squaw had gone with her
people.

She had left him her kettle and the piece of skin.
To an Indian woman her blanket is hood and cloak
and muff all in one.  She never goes out of doors
without it.

Wilfred smoothed the gloves she had made him
and pulled up the blanket socks.  Oh, she had been
good to him!  He thought he understood it all now—that
farewell kiss, and the desire to hide him until
the fierce warriors of her tribe had passed on.  He
wrapped the skin over his shoulders, slung the kettle on
his arm, chose out a good strong staff to lean on, and
held himself ready for the chapter of accidents,
whatever they might be.

No one came near him.  The sounds grew fainter and
fainter.  The silence, the awful stillness, was creeping
all around him once again.  It became unbearable—the
dread, the disappointment, the suspense.  Wilfred climbed
out of the hut and swung himself into the branches
of the nearest pine.  The duck and the snow-birds
were frozen as hard as stones.  But the fire was out
long ago.  Wilfred had no matches, no means of
lighting it up again.  He put back the game; even
Yula could not eat it in that state.  He swung himself
higher up in the tree, just in time to catch sight
of the vanishing train, winding its way along the
vast snow-covered waste.  He watched it fading to a
moving line.  What was it leaving behind?  A lost
boy.  If Wilfred passed the night in the tree he
would be frozen to death.  If he crept back into the
tumble-down hut he might be buried beneath another
snow.  If he went down to the pool he might find
the ashes of the Indians' camp-fires still glowing.  If
they had left a fire behind them he must see the
smoke—the snow-soaked branches were sure to smoke.
The sleet was driving in his face, but he looked in
vain for the dusky curling wreath that must have
been visible at so short a distance.

Was all hope gone?  His head grew dizzy.  There
were no words on his lips, and the bitter cry in his
heart died mute.  Then he seemed to hear again his
mother's voice reading to him, as she used to read in
far-off days by the evening fire: "I will not fail thee,
nor forsake thee.  Be strong, and of a good courage.
Be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.  For the
Lord thy God is with thee, whithersoever thou goest."

The Indian train was out of sight, but the trampling
of those fifty ponies, dragging the heavily-laden
travoys, had left a beaten track—a path so broad
he could not lose it—and he knew that it would bring
him to some white man's home.

Wilfred sprang down from the tree, decided,
resolute.  Better to try and find this shop in the
wilderness than linger there and die.  The snow
beneath the tree was crisp and hard.  Yula bounded on
before him, eager to follow where the Blackfeet dogs
had passed.  They were soon upon the road, trudging
steadily onward.

The dog had evidently shared the strangers' breakfast;
he was neither hungry nor thirsty.  Not so his
poor little master, who was feeling very faint for want
of a dinner, when he saw a bit of pemmican on the
ground, dropped no doubt by one of the Indian children.

Wilfred snatched it up and began to eat.  Pemmican
is the Indians' favourite food.  It is made of
meat cut in slices and dried.  It is then pounded
between two smooth stones, and put in a bag of
buffalo-skin.  Melted fat is poured over it, to make it keep.
To the best kinds of pemmican berries and sugar are
added.  It forms the most solid food a man can have.
There are different ways of cooking it, but travellers,
or voyageurs, as they are usually called in Canada,
eat it raw.  It was a piece of raw pemmican Wilfred
had picked up.  Hunger lent it the flavour it might
have lacked at any other time.

With this for a late dinner, and a rest on a fallen
tree, he felt himself once more, and started off again
with renewed vigour.  The sleet was increasing with
the coming dusk.  On he toiled, growing whiter and
whiter, until his snow-covered figure was scarcely
distinguishable from the frozen ground.  Yula was
powdered from head to foot; moreover, poor dog, he was
obliged to stop every now and then to bite off the
little icicles which were forming between his toes.

Fortunately for the weary travellers the sky began
to clear when the moon arose.  Before them stood
dark ranks of solemn, stately pines, with here and
there a poplar thicket rising black and bare from
the sparkling ground.  Their charred and shrivelled
branches showed the work of the recent prairie fires,
which had only been extinguished by the snowstorm.

Wilfred whistled Yula closer and closer to his side,
as the forest echoes wakened to the moose-call and
the wolf-howl.  On, on they walked through the
dusky shadows cast by the giant pines, until the
strange meteors of the north lit up the icy night,
flitting across the starry sky in such swift succession
the Indians call it the dance of the dead spirits.

In a scene so weird and wild the boldest heart
might quail.  Wilfred felt his courage dwindling with
every step, when Yula sprang forward with a bark
that roused a sleeping herd, and Wilfred found
himself in the midst of the Indian ponies, snorting and
kicking at the disturber of their peace.  The difficulty
of getting Yula out again, without losing the track or
rousing the camp, which they must now be approaching,
engrossed Wilfred, and taxed his powers to their
uttermost.  He could see the gleam of their many
watch-fires, and guided his course more warily.
Imposing silence on Yula by every device he could
imagine, he left the beaten track which would have
taken him into the midst of the dreaded Blackfeet,
and slanted further and further into the forest gloom,
but not so far as to lose the glow of the Indians' fires.
In the first faint gray of the wintry dawn he heard
the rushing of a mighty fall, and found concealment
in a wide expanse of frozen reeds and stunted willows.

Yula had been brought to order.  A tired dog is
far more manageable.  He lay down at his master's
feet, whilst Wilfred watched and listened.  He was
wide of the Blackfeet camp, yet not at such a distance
as to be unable to distinguish the sounds of awakening
life within it from the roar of the waterfall.  To
his right the ground was rising.  He scarcely felt
himself safe so near the Blackfeet, and determined to
push on to the higher ground, where he would have
a better chance of seeing what they were about.  If
they moved on, he could go back to their camping-place
and gather the crumbs they might have let fall,
and boil himself some water before their fires were
extinguished, and then follow in their wake as before.

He began to climb the hill with difficulty, when
he was aware of a thin, blue column of light smoke
curling upwards in the morning air.  It was not from
the Indian camp.  Had he nearly reached his goal?
The light was steadily increasing, and he could clearly
see on the height before him three or four tall pines,
which had been stripped of their branches by the
voyageur's axe, and left to mark a landing-place.
These lop-sticks, as the Canadians call them, were a
welcome sight.  He reached them at last, and gained
the view he had been longing to obtain.  At his feet
rolled the majestic river, plunging in one broad, white
sheet over a hidden precipice.

In the still uncertain light of the early dawn the
cataract seemed twice its actual size.  The jagged tops
of the pine trees on the other side of the river rose
against the pale green of coming day.  Close above
the falls the bright star of the morning gleamed like
a diamond on the rim of the descending flood; at its
foot the silvery spray sprang high into the air,
covering the gloomy pines which had reared their dark
branches in many a crack and cleft with glittering
spangles.

Nestling at the foot of the crag on which Wilfred
stood was the well-built stockade of the trading-fort.
The faint blue line of smoke which he had perceived
was issuing from the chimney of the trader's house,
but the inmates were not yet astir.

He brushed the tears from his eyes, but they were
mingled tears of joy and thankfulness and exhaustion.
As he was watching, a party of Indians stole out from
their camp, and posted themselves among the frozen
reeds which he had so recently vacated.

The chief, with a few of the Blackfeet, followed by
three or four squaws laden with skins, advanced to
the front of the stockade, where they halted.  The
chief was waving in his hand a little flag, to show
that he had come to trade.  After a while the sounds
of life and movement began within the fort.  The
little group outside was steadily increasing in numbers.
Some more of the Blackfeet warriors had loaded their
horses and their wives, and were coming up behind
their chief, with their heavy bags of pemmican
hanging like panniers across the backs of the horses,
whilst the poor women toiled after them with the
piles of skins and leather.

All was bustle and activity inside the trader's walls.
Wilfred guessed they were making all sorts of prudent
preparations before they ventured to receive so large
a party.  He was thinking of the men in ambush
among the reeds, and he longed to give some warning
to the Hudson Bay officer, who could have no idea
of the numbers lurking round his gate.

But how was this to be done in time?  There was
but one entrance to the fort.  He was afraid to
descend his hill and knock for admittance, under
the lynx-like eyes of the Blackfoot chief, who was
growing impatient, and was making fresh signs to
attract the trader's attention.

At last there was a creaking sound from the fort.
Bolts and bars were withdrawn, and the gate was
slowly opened.  Out came the Hudson Bay officer,
carefully shutting it behind him.  He was a tall,
white-haired man, with an air of command about him, and
the easy grace of a gentleman in every action.  He
surveyed his wild visitors for a moment or two, and
then advanced to meet them with a smile of welcome.
The chief came a step or two forward, shook hands
with the white man, and began to make a speech.  A
few of his companions followed his example.

"Now," thought Wilfred, "while all this talking
and speechifying is abroad, I may get a chance to
reach the fort unobserved."

He slid down the steep hill, with Yula after him,
crept along the back of the stockade, and round the
end farthest from the reeds.  In another moment he
was at the gate.  A gentle tap with his hand was all
he dared to give.  It met with no answer.  He
repeated it a little louder.  Yula barked.  The gate was
opened just a crack, and a boy about his own age
peeped out.

"Let me in," said Wilfred desperately.  "I have
something to tell you."

The crack was widened.  Wilfred slipped in and
Yula followed.  The gate was shut and barred behind
them.

"Well?" asked the boyish porter.

"There are dozens of Blackfeet Indians hiding
among the frozen reeds.  I saw them stealing down
from their camp before it was light.  I am afraid
they mean mischief," said Wilfred, lowering his voice.

"We need to be careful," returned the other, glancing
round at their many defences; "but who are you?"

"I belong to some settlers across the prairie.  I
have lost my way.  I have been wandering about all
night, following the trail of the Blackfeet.  That is
how I came to know and see what they were doing,"
replied Wilfred.

"They always come up in numbers," answered the
stranger thoughtfully, "ready for a brush with the
Crees.  They seem friendly to us."

As the boy spoke he slipped aside a little shutter
in the gate, and peeped through a tiny grill.

In the middle of the enclosure there was a wooden
house painted white.  Three or four iron funnels
stuck out of the roof instead of chimneys, giving it a
very odd appearance.  There were a few more huts
and sheds.  But Wilfred's attention was called off from
these surroundings, for a whole family of dogs had
rushed out upon Yula, with a chorus of barking that
deafened every other sound.  For Yula had marched
straight to the back door of the house, where food
was to be had, and was shaking it and whining to be
let in.

The young stranger Gaspé took a bit of paper and
a pencil out of his pocket and wrote hastily: "There
are lots more of the Blackfeet hiding amongst the
reeds.  What does that mean?"

"Louison!" he cried to a man at work in one of
the sheds, "go outside and give this to grandfather."





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.. _`THE SHOP IN THE WILDERNESS`:

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   CHAPTER VIII.


.. class:: center large bold

   *THE SHOP IN THE WILDERNESS.*

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As soon as Gaspé had despatched his messenger
he turned to Wilfred, observing, in tones of
grateful satisfaction, "I am so glad we know in time."

"Is that your grandfather?" asked Wilfred.

Gaspé nodded.  "Come and look at him."

The two boys were soon watching earnestly through
the grating, their faces almost touching.  Gaspé's arm
was over Wilfred's shoulder, as they drew closer and
closer to each other.

Gaspé's grandfather took the slip of paper from his
man, glanced at it, and crushed it in his hand.  The
chief was hastily heaping a mass of buffalo robes and
skins and bags of pemmican upon one of the horses, a
gift for the white man, horse and all.  This was to
show his big heart.

"Do you hear what he is saying?" whispered Gaspé,
who understood the Indians much better than Wilfred
did.  "Listen!"

"Are there any Crees here?  Crees have no
manners.  Crees are like dogs, always ready to bite if
you turn your head away; but the Blackfeet have
large hearts, and love hospitality."

"After all, those men in the reeds may only be on
the watch for fear of a surprise from the Crees,"
continued Gaspé.

"Will there be a fight?" asked Wilfred breathlessly.

"No, I think not," answered Gaspé.  "The Crees
have lived amongst us whites so long they have given
up the war-path.  But," he added confidentially, "I
have locked our old Indian in the kitchen, for if they
caught sight of him they might say we were friends
of the Crees, and set on us."

One door in the white-painted house was standing
open.  It led into a large and almost empty room.
Just inside it a number of articles were piled on the
floor—a gun, blankets, scarlet cloth, and a
brightly-painted canister of tea.  Louison came back to fetch
them, for a return present, with which the chief
seemed highly delighted.

"We see but little of you white men," he said;
"and our young men do not always know how to
behave.  But if you would come amongst us more,
we chiefs would restrain them."

"He would have hard work," laughed Wilfred,
little thinking how soon his words were to be verified.
The Blackfeet standing round their chief, with their
piles of skins, were so obviously getting excited, and
impatient to begin the real trading, the chief must
have felt even he could not hold them back much
longer.  But he was earnest in his exhortation to
them not to give way to violence or rough behaviour.

Gaspé's grandfather was silently noting every face,
without appearing to do so; and mindful of the
warning he had received, he led the way to his gate,
which he invited them to enter, observing, "My places
are but small, friends.  All shall come in by turns,
but only a few at a time."

Gaspé drew back the bar and threw the gate
wide.  In walked the stately chief, with one or two
of his followers who had taken part in the
speech-making.  The excited crowd at the back of them
pushed their way in, as if they feared the gate might
be shut in their faces.

Gaspé remonstrated, assuring them there was no
hurry, all should have their turn.

The chief waved them back, and the last of the
group contented themselves with standing in the
gateway itself, to prevent it being shut against them.

Gaspé gave up the vain attempt to close it, and
resumed his post.

"I am here on the watch," he whispered to Wilfred;
"but you are cold and hungry.  Go with grandfather
into the shop."

"I would rather stay with you," answered Wilfred.
"I am getting used to being hungry."

Gaspé answered this by pushing into his hand a
big hunch of bread and butter, which he had brought
with him from his hurried breakfast.

Meanwhile Gaspé's grandfather had entered the
house, taking with him the Blackfoot chief.  He
invited the others to enter and seat themselves on
the floor of the empty room into which Wilfred had
already had a peep.  He unlocked an inner door,
opening into a passage, which divided the great
waiting-room from the small shop beyond.  This had
been carefully prepared for the reception of their
wild customers.  Only a few of his goods were left
upon the shelves, which were arranged with much
ingenuity, and seemed to display a great variety of
wares, all of them attractive in Indian eyes.  The
bright-coloured cloths, cut in short lengths, were
folded in fantastic heaps; the blankets were hung
in graceful festoons.  Beads scattered lightly on trays
glittered behind the counter, on which the empty
scales were lightly swaying up and down, like
miniature swinging-boats.

A high lattice protected the front of the counter.
Gaspé's grandfather established himself behind it.
Louison took his place as door-keeper.  The chief
and two of his particular friends were the first to
be admitted.  Louison locked the door to keep out
the others.  It was the only way to preserve order.
The wild, fierce strangers from the snow-covered
plain and the darksome forest drew at once to the
stove—a great iron box in the middle of the shop,
with its huge black funnel rising through the ceiling.
Warmth without smoke was a luxury unknown in
the wigwam.

The Indians walked slowly round the shop, examining
and considering the contents of the shelves,
until their choice was made.

One of the three walked up to the counter and
handed his pile of skins to the trader, Mr. De Brunier,
through a little door in the lattice, pointing to some
bright scarlet cloth and a couple of blankets.  The
chief was examining the guns.  All three wanted
shot, and the others inquired earnestly for the
Indians' special delight, "tea and suga'."  But when
they saw the canister opened, and the tea poured
into the scale, there was a grunt of dissatisfaction
all round.

"What for?" demanded the chief.  "Why put tea
one side that swing and little bit of iron the other?
Who wants little bit of iron?  We don't know what
that medicine is."

The Indians call everything medicine that seems to
them learned and wise.

Mr. De Brunier tried to explain the use of his
scales, and took up his steelyard to see if it would
find more favour.

"Be fair," pursued the chief; "make one side as
big as the other.  Try bag of pemmican against your
blankets and tea, then when the thing stops swinging
you take pemmican, we blankets and tea—that fair!"

His companions echoed their chief's sentiments.

"As you like," smiled the trader.  "We only want
to make a fair exchange."

So the heavy bag of pemmican was put in the place
of the weight, and a nice heap of tea was poured upon
the blanket to make the balance true.  The Indians
were delighted.

"Now," continued Mr. De Brunier, "we must
weigh the shot and the gun against your skins,
according to your plan."

But when the red men saw their beautiful marten
and otter and fisher skins piling higher and higher,
and the heavy bag of shot still refusing to rise, a
grave doubt as to the correctness of their own view
of the matter arose in the Indians' minds.  The first
served took up his scarlet cloth and blanket and went
out quickly, whilst the others deliberated.

The trader waited with good-humoured patience
and a quiet gleam of amusement in the corner of his
eye, when they told him at last to do it his own way,
for the steel swing was a great medicine warriors
could not understand.  It was plain it could only be
worked by some great medicine man like himself.

This decision had been reached so slowly, the
impatience of the crowd in the waiting-room was at
spirit-boil.

The brave who had come back satisfied was exhibiting
his blankets and his scarlet cloth, which had to be
felt and looked at by all in turn.

"Were there many more inside?" they asked eagerly.

He shook his head.

A belief that the good things would all be gone
before the rest of the Indians could get their turn
spread among the excited crowd like wild-fire.

Gaspé still held to his watch by the gate, with
Wilfred beside him.

There was plenty of laughing and talking among
the party of resolute men who kept it open; they
seemed full of fun, and were joking each other in the
highest spirits.  Gaspé's eyes turned again and again
to the frozen reeds, but all was quiet.

Wilfred was earnestly watching for a chance to
ask the mirthful Blackfeet if an old squaw, the
Far-off-Dawn, had joined their camp.  He could not
make them understand him, but Gaspé repeated the
question.

At that moment one of the fiercest-looking of the
younger warriors rushed out of the waiting-room in a
state of intense excitement.  He beckoned to his
companions at the gate, exclaiming, "If we don't help
ourselves there will be nothing left for you and me."

"We know who will see fair play," retorted the
young chief, who was answering Gaspé.

A whoop rang through the frosty air, and the still
stiff reeds seemed suddenly alive with dusky faces.
The crush round the inner door in the waiting-room
became intense.

"Help me," whispered Gaspé, seizing Wilfred's arm
and dragging him after him through the sheds to the
back of the house.  He took out a key and unlocked
a side door.  There was a second before him, with the
keyhole at the reverse hand.  It admitted them into
a darkened room, for the windows were closely
shuttered; but Gaspé knew his ground, and was not
at a moment's loss.

The double doors were locked and bolted in double
quick time behind them.  Then Gaspé lifted up a
heavy iron bar and banged it into its socket.  Noise
did not matter.  The clamour in the waiting-room
drowned every other sound.

"They will clear the shop," he said, "but we
must stop them getting into the storeroom.  Come
along."

Wilfred was feeling the way.  He stumbled over a
chair; his hand felt a table.  He guessed he was in
the family sitting-room.  Gaspé put his mouth to the
keyhole of an inner door.

"Chirag!" he shouted to their Indian servant,
"barricade."

The noises which succeeded showed that his
command was being obeyed in that direction.

Gaspé was already in the storeroom, endeavouring
to push a heavy box of nails before the other door
leading into the shop.  Wilfred was beside him in a
moment.  He had not much pushing power left in
him after his night of wandering.

"Perhaps I can push a pound," he thought, laying
his hands by Gaspé's.

"Now, steady! both together we shall do it," they
said, and with one hard strain the box was driven
along the floor.

"That is something," cried Gaspé, heaving up a bag
of ironmongery to put on the top of it.  And he
looked round for something else sufficiently ponderous
to complete his barricade.

"What is this?" asked Wilfred, tugging at a chest
of tools.

Meanwhile a dozen hatchets' heads were hammering
at the door from the waiting-room where Louison was
stationed.  The crack of the wood giving way beneath
their blows inspired Gaspé with redoubled energy.
The chest was hoisted upon the box.  He surveyed
his barricade with satisfaction.  But their work was
not yet done.  He dragged forward a set of steps,
and running up to the top, threw open a trap-door in
the ceiling.  A ray of light streamed down into the
room, showing Wilfred, very white and exhausted,
leaning against the pile they had erected.

Gaspé sprang to the ground, rushed back into the
sitting-room, and began to rummage in the cupboard.

"Here is grandfather's essence of peppermint and
the sugar-basin and lots of biscuits!" he exclaimed.
"You are faint, you have had no breakfast yet.
I am forgetting.  Here."

Wilfred's benumbed fingers felt in the sugar for a
good-sized lump.  Gaspé poured his peppermint drops
upon it with a free hand.  The warming, reviving
dose brought back the colour to Wilfred's pale lips.

"Feel better?" asked his energetic companion,
running up the steps with a roll of cloth on his
shoulder, which he deposited safely in the loft above,
inviting Wilfred to follow.  The place was warm, for
the iron chimneys ran through it, like so many black
columns.  Wilfred was ready to embrace the nearest.

Gaspé caught his arm.  "You are too much of a
human icicle for that," he cried.  "I'll bring up the
blankets next.  Roll yourself up in them and get
warm gradually, or you will be worse than ever.
You must take care of yourself, for I dare not stop.
It is always a bit dangerous when the Indians come
up in such numbers to a little station like this.
There is nobody but grandfather and me and our two
men about the place, and what are four against a
hundred?  But all know what to do.  Chirag watches
inside the house, I outside, and Louison keeps the
shop door.  That is the most dangerous post, because
of the crush to get in."

A crash and a thud in the room below verified his
words.

"There! down it goes," he exclaimed, as a peal of
laughter from many voices followed the rush of the
crowd from one room to the other.

"They will be in here next," he added, springing
down the steps for another load.  Wilfred tried to
shake off the strange sensations which oppressed him,
and took it from him.  Another and another followed
quickly, until the boys had removed the greater part
of the most valuable of the stores into the roof.  The
guns and the heavy bags of shot had all been carried
up in the early morning, before the gate of the fort
was opened.

And now the hammering began at the storeroom
door, amid peals of uproarious laughter.

Gaspé tore up the steps with another heavy roll of
bright blue cloth.

"We can do no more," he said, pausing for breath.
"Now we will shut ourselves in here."

"We will have these up first," returned Wilfred,
seizing hold of the top of the steps, and trying to drag
them through the trap-door.

"Right!" ejaculated Gaspé.  "If we had left them
standing in the middle of the storeroom, it would have
been inviting the Blackfeet to follow us."

They let down the trap-door as noiselessly as they
could, and drew the heavy bolt at the very moment
the door below was broken open and the triumphant
crowd rushed wildly in, banging down their bags of
pemmican on the floor, and seizing the first thing
which came to hand in return.

Louison had been knocked down in the first rush
from the waiting-room, and was leaning against the
wall, having narrowly escaped being trampled to death.
"All right!" he shouted to his master, who had
jumped up on his counter to see if his agile servitor
had regained his feet.  It was wild work, but
Mr. De Brunier took it all in good part, flinging his
blankets right and left wherever he saw an eager
hand outstretched to receive them.  He knew that it
was far better to give before they had time to take,
and so keep up a semblance of trade.  Many a
beautiful skin and buffalo-robe was tossed across the
counter in return.  The heterogeneous pile was growing
higher and higher beside him, and in the confusion
it was hard to tell how much was intended for
purchase, how much for pillage.

The chief, the Great Swan, as his people called him,
still stood by the scales, determined to see if the great
medicine worked fairly for all his people.

Mr. De Brunier called to him by his Indian name:
"Oma-ka-pee-mulkee-yeu, do you not hear what I am
saying?  Your young men are too rough.  Restrain
them.  You say you can.  How am I to weigh and
measure to each his right portion in such a rout?"

"Give them all something and they will be content,"
shouted the chief, trying his best to restore order.

Dozens of gaudy cotton handkerchiefs went flying
over the black heads, scrambling with each other to
get possession of them.  Spoonfuls of beads were
received with chuckles of delight by the nearest ranks;
hut the Indians outside the crowd were growing hot
and angry.  Turns had been long since disregarded.
It was catch as catch can.  They broke down the
lattice, and helped themselves from the shelves behind
the counter.  These were soon cleared.  A party of
strong young fellows, laughing as if it were the best
fun in the world, leaped clear over the counter, and
began to chop at the storeroom door with their
hatchets.  With a dexterous hand Mr. De Brunier
flung his bright silks in their faces.  The dancing
skeins were quickly caught up.  But the work of
demolition went forward.  The panels were reduced
to matchwood.  Three glittering hatchets swung high
over the men's heads, came down upon the still
resisting framework, and smashed it.  The mirthful crowd
dashed in.

The shop was already cleared.  Mr. De Brunier
would have gone into his storeroom with them if he
could, but a dozen guns were pointed in his face.  It
was mere menace, no one attempted to fire.  But the
chief thought it was going too far.  He backed to
the waiting-room.  Mr. De Brunier seized his empty
tea-canister, and offered it to him as a parting gift,
saying in most emphatic tones, "This is not our
way of doing business.  Some of these men have got
too much, and some too little.  It is not my fault.  I
must deal now with the tribe.  Let them all lay
down on the floor the rest of the skins and bags they
have brought, and take away all I have to give in
exchange, and you must divide when you get back to
your camp, to every man his right share."

Oma-ka-pee-mulkee-yeu rushed off with his canister
under his arm; not into the storeroom, where the
dismayed trader hoped his presence might have
proved a restraint, but straight through the waiting-room
with a mad dash into the court, and through the
gate, where he halted to give a thunderous shout of
"Crees!  Crees!"  The magic words brought out his
followers pell-mell.  A second shout, a wilder alarm,
made the tribe rally round their chief, in the full
belief the Crees had surprised their camp in their
hateful dog-like fashion, taking their bite at the
women and children when the warriors' heads were
turned.

But the unmannerly foe was nowhere in sight.

"Over the hill!" shouted their Great Wild Swan,
the man of twenty fights.

Meanwhile the gate of the little fort was securely
barred against all intruders.  The waiting squaws
meekly turned their horses' heads, and followed their
deluded lords, picking up the beads and nails which
had been dropped in their headlong haste.

"Woe to Maxica," thought Wilfred, "if he should
happen to be returning for his moose!"

The wild war-whoop died away in the distance,
only the roar of the cataract broke the stillness of the
snow-laden air.

De Brunier walked back into his house, to count
up the gain and loss, and see how much reckless
mischief that morning's work had brought him.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`NEW FRIENDS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IX.


.. class:: center large bold

   *NEW FRIENDS.*

.. vspace:: 2

"We shall always be friends," said Gaspé,
looking into Wilfred's face, as they stood side
by side against the chimney in the loft, emptying
the biscuit-canister between them.

Wilfred answered with a sunny smile.  The sounds
below suddenly changed their character.  The general
stampede to the gate was beginning.

The boys flew to the window.  It was a double
one, very small and thickly frozen.  They could not
see the least thing through its glittering panes.

They could scarcely believe their ears, but the
sudden silence which succeeded convinced Gaspé their
rough visitors had beaten a hasty retreat.

"Anyhow we will wait a bit, and make sure before
we go down," they decided.

But De Brunier's first care was for his grandson,
and he was missing.

"Gaspard!" he shouted, and his call was echoed by
Louison and Chirag.

"Here, grandfather; I am here, I am coming,"
answered the boy, gently raising the trap-door and
peeping down at the dismantled storeroom.  A great
bag of goose-feathers, which had been hoarded by
some thrifty squaw, had been torn open, and the down
was flying in every direction.

There was a groan from Mr. De Brunier.  All his
most valuable stores had vanished.

"Not quite so bad as that, grandfather," cried
Gaspé brightly.

The trader stepped up on to the remains of the
barricade the boys had erected, and popped his head
through the open trap-door.

"Well done, Gaspard!" he exclaimed.

"This other boy helped me," was the instantaneous
reply.

The other boy came out from the midst of the
blanket heap, feeling more dead than alive, and
expecting every moment some one would say to him,
"Now go," and he had nowhere to go.

Mr. De Brunier looked at him in amazement.  A
solitary boy in these lone wastes!  Had he dropped
from the skies?

"Come down, my little lad, and tell me who you
are," he said kindly; but without waiting for a reply
he walked on through the broken door to survey the
devastation beyond.

"I have grown gray in the service of the Company,
and never had a more provoking disaster," he lamented,
as he began to count the tumbled heap of valuable
furs blocking his pathway.

Louison, looking pale and feeling dizzy from his
recent knock over, was collecting the bags of pemmican.
Chirag, released from his imprisonment, was opening
window shutters and replenishing the burnt-out fires.
Gaspé dropped down from the roof, without waiting
to replace the steps, and went to his grandfather's
assistance, leaving Wilfred to have a good sleep in the
blanket heap.

The poor boy was so worn out he slept heavily.
When he roused himself at last, the October day was
drawing to its close, and Gaspé was laughing beside him.

"Have not you had sleep enough?" he asked.
"Would not dinner be an improvement?"

Wilfred wakened from his dreams of Acland's Hut.
Aunt Miriam and Pe-na-Koam had got strangely jumbled
together; but up he jumped to grasp his new friend's
warm, young hand, and wondered what had happened.
He felt as if he had been tossing like a ball from one
strange scene to another.  When he found himself
sitting on a real chair, and not on the hard ground, the
transition was so great it seemed like another dream.

The room was low, no carpet on the floor, only a
few chairs ranged round the stove in the centre; but
a real dinner, hot and smoking, was spread on the
unpainted deal table.

Mr. De Brunier, with one arm thrown over the
back of his chair, was smoking, to recall his lost
serenity.  An account-book lay beside his unfinished
dinner.  Sometimes his eye wandered over its long
rows of figures, and then for a while he seemed
absorbed in mental calculation.

He glanced at Wilfred's thin hands and pinched cheeks.

"Let the boy eat," he said to Gaspé.

As the roast goose vanished from Wilfred's plate
the smile returned to his lips and the mirth to his
heart.  He outdid the hungry hunter of proverbial
fame.  The pause came at last; he could not quite
keep on eating all night, Indian fashion.  He really
declined the sixth helping Gaspé was pressing
upon him.

"No, thanks; I have had a Benjamin's portion—five
times as much as you have had—and I am
dreadfully obliged to you," said Wilfred, with a bow
to Mr. De Brunier; "but there is Yula, that is my
dog.  May he have these bones?"

"He has had something more than bones already;
Chirag fed him when he fed my puppies," put in Gaspé.

"Puppies," repeated Mr. De Brunier.  "Dogs, I say."

"Not yet, grandfather," remonstrated the happy
Gaspé.  "You said they would not be really dogs,
ready for work, until they were a year old, and it
wants a full week."

"Please, sir," interrupted Wilfred abruptly, "can
you tell me how I can get home?"

"Where is your home?" asked Mr. De Brunier.

"With my uncle, at Acland's Hut," answered
Wilfred promptly.

"Acland's Hut," repeated Mr. De Brunier, looking
across at Gaspé for elucidation.  They did not know
such a place existed.

"It is miles away from here," added Wilfred
sorrowfully.  "I went out hunting—"

"You—a small boy like you—to go hunting
alone!" exclaimed Mr. De Brunier.

"Please, sir, I mean I rode on a pony by the cart
which was to bring back the game," explained poor
Wilfred, growing very rueful, as all hope of getting
home again seemed to recede further and further
from him.  "The pony threw me," he added, "and
when I came to myself the men were gone."

"Have you no father?" whispered Gaspé.

"My father died a year ago, and I was left at
school at Garry," Wilfred went on.

"Fort Garry!" exclaimed Mr. De Brunier, brightening.
"If this had happened a few weeks earlier, I
could easily have sent you back to Garry in one of
the Company's boats.  They are always rowing
up and down the river during the busy summer
months, but they have just stopped for the winter
With this Blackfoot camp so near us, I dare not
unbar my gate again to-night, so make yourself
contented.  In the morning we will see what can
be done."

"Nothing!" thought Wilfred, as he gathered the
goose-bones together for Yula's benefit.  "If you do
not know where Acland's Hut is, and I cannot tell
you, night or morning what difference can it make?"

He studied the table-cloth, thinking hard.  "Bowkett
and Diomé had talked of going to a hunters'
camp.  Where was that?"

"Ask Louison," said Mr. De Brunier, in reply to
his inquiry.

Gaspé ran out to put the question.

Louison was a hunter's son.  He had wintered in
the camp himself when he was a boy.  The hunters
gathered there in November.  Parties would soon be
calling at the fort, to sell their skins by the way.
Wilfred could go on with one of them, no doubt, and
then Bowkett could take him home.

Wilfred's heart grew lighter.  It was a roundabout-road,
but he felt as if getting back to Bowkett
was next to getting home.

"How glad your uncle will be to see you!" cried
Gaspé radiantly, picturing the bright home-coming
in the warmth of his own sympathy.

"Oh, don't!" said Wilfred; "please, don't.  It
won't be like that; not a bit.  Nobody wants me.
Aunt wanted my little sister, not me.  You don't
understand; I am such a bother to her."

Gaspé was silenced, but his hand clasped Wilfred's
a little closer.  All the chivalrous feelings of the
knightly De Bruniers were rousing in his breast for
the strange boy who had brought them the timely
warning.  For some of the best and noblest blood of
old France was flowing in his veins.  A De Brunier
had come out with the early French settlers, the first
explorers, the first voyageurs along the mighty
Canadian rivers.  A De Brunier had fought against
Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham, in the front ranks
of that gallant band who faithfully upheld their
nation's honour, loyal to the last to the shameless
France, which despised, neglected, and abandoned
them—men whose high sense of duty never swerved
in the hour of trial, when they were given over into
the hands of their enemy.  Who cared what happened
in that far-off corner of the world?  It was not
worth troubling about.  So the France of that day
reasoned when she flung them from her.

It was of those dark hours Gaspé loved to make
his grandfather talk, and he was thinking that
nothing would divert Wilfred from his troubled thoughts
like one of grandfather's stories.  The night drew on.
The snow was falling thicker and denser than before.
Mr. De Brunier turned his chair to the stove, afraid
to go to bed with the Blackfoot camp within half-a-mile
of his wooden walls.

"They might," he said, "have a fancy to give us
a midnight scare, to see what more they could get."

The boys begged hard to remain.  The fire, shut
in its iron box, was burning at its best, emitting a
dull red glow, even through its prison walls.  Gaspé
refilled his grandfather's pipe.

"Wilfred," he remarked gently, "has a home that
is no home, and he thinks we cannot understand
the ups and downs of life, or what it is to be pushed
to the wall."

Gaspé had touched the right spring.  The veteran
trader smiled.  "Not know, my lad, what it is to be
pushed to the wall, when I have been a servant for
fifty years in the very house where my grandfather
was master, before the golden lilies on our snow-white
banner were torn down to make room for your Union
Jack!  Why am I telling you this to-night?  Just
to show you, when all seems lost in the present, there
is the future beyond, and no one can tell what that
may hold.  The pearl lies hidden under the stormiest
waters.  Do you know old Cumberland House?  A
De Brunier built it, the first trading-fort in the
Saskatchewan.  It was lost to us when the cold-hearted
Bourbon flung us like a bone to the English mastiff.
Our homes were ours no longer.  Our lives were in
our hands, but our honour no one but ourselves could
throw away.  What did we do?  What could we do?
What all can do—our duty to the last.  We braved
our trouble; and when all seemed lost, help came.
Who was it felt for us?  The men who had torn
from us our colours and entered our gates by force.
Under the British flag our homes were given back,
our rights assured.  Our Canadian Quebec remains
unaltered, a transplant from the old France of the
Bourbons.  In the long years that have followed the
harvest has been reaped on both sides.  Now, my
boy, don't break your heart with thinking, If there
had been anybody to care for me, I should not have
been left senseless in a snow-covered wilderness; but
rouse your manhood and face your trouble, for in
God's providence it may be more than made up to
you.  Here you can stay until some opportunity
occurs to send you to this hunters' camp.  You are
sure it will be your best way to get home again?"

"Yes," answered Wilfred decidedly.  "I shall find
Bowkett there, and I am sure he will take me back
to Acland's Hut.  But please, sir, I did not mean aunt
and uncle were unkind; but I had been there such a
little while, and somehow I was always wrong; and
then I know I teased."

The cloud was gathering over him again.

"If—" he sighed.

"Don't dwell on the *ifs*, my boy; talk of what has
been.  That will teach you best what may be," inter
posed Mr. De Brunier.

Gaspé saw the look of pain in Wilfred's eyes,
although he did not say again, "Please don't talk
about it," for he was afraid Mr. De Brunier would
not call that facing his trouble.

Gaspé came to the rescue.  "But, grandfather, you
have not told us what the harvest was that Canada
reaped," he put in.

"Cannot you see it for yourself, Gaspard?" said
Mr. De Brunier.  "When French and English,
conquered and conqueror, settled down side by side, it
was their respect for each other, their careful
consideration for each other's rights and wrongs, that
taught their children and their children's children
the great lesson how to live and let live.  No other
nation in the world has learned as we have done.  It
is this that makes our Canada a land of refuge for
the down-trodden slave.  And we, the French in
Canada, what have we reaped?" he went on, shaking
the ashes from his pipe, and looking at the two boys
before him, French and English; but the old lines
were fading, and uniting in the broader name of
Canadian.  "Yes," he repeated, "what did we find at
the bottom of our bitter cup?  Peace, security, and
freedom, whilst the streets of Paris ran red with
Frenchmen's blood.  The last De Brunier in France
was dragged from his ancestral home to the steps of
the guillotine by Frenchmen's hands, and the old
chateau in Brittany is left a moss-grown ruin.  When
my father saw the hereditary foe of his country walk
into Cumberland House to turn him out, they met
with a bonjour [good day]; and when they parted this
was the final word: 'You are a young man, Monsieur
De Brunier, but your knowledge of the country and
your influence with the Indians can render us
valuable assistance.  If at any time you choose to take
office in your old locale, you will find that faithful
service will be handsomely requited.'  We kept our
honour and laid down our pride.  Content.  Your
British Queen has no more loyal subjects in all her
vast dominions than her old French Canadians."

There was a mist before Wilfred's eyes, and his
voice was low and husky.  He only whispered, "I
shall not forget, I never can forget to-night."

The small hours of the morning were numbered
before Gaspé opened the door of his little sleeping
room, which Wilfred was to share.  It was not
much bigger than a closet.  The bed seemed to
fill it.

There was just room for Gaspé's chest of clothes
and an array of pegs.  But to Wilfred it seemed a
palace, in its cozy warmth.  It made him think of
Pe-na-Koam.  He hoped she was as comfortable in
the Blackfoot camp.

Gaspé was growing sleepy.  One arm was round
Wilfred's neck; he roused himself to answer, "Did
not you hear what the warrior with the scalps at his
belt told me?  She came into their camp, and they
gave her food as long as she could eat it.  She was
too old to travel, and they left her asleep by their
camp-fires."

Up sprang Wilfred.  "Whatever shall I do?  I
have brought away her kettle; I thought she had
gone to her own people, and left it behind her for me."

"Do!" repeated Gaspé, laughing.  "Why, go to
sleep old fellow; what else can we do at four o'clock
in the morning?  If we don't make haste about it,
we shall have no night at all."

Gaspé was quick to follow his own advice.  But
the "no night" was Wilfred's portion.  There was no
rest for him for thinking of Pe-na-Koam.  How was
she to get her breakfast?  The Blackfeet might have
given her food, but how could she boil a drop of water
without her kettle?

At the first movement in the house he slipped out
of bed and dressed himself.  The fire had burned low
in the great stove in the sitting-room, but when he
softly opened the door of their closet it struck fairly
warm.  The noise he had heard was Louison coming
in with a great basket of wood to build it up.

"A fire in prison is a dull affair by daylight,"
remarked Wilfred.  "I think I shall go for a
walk—a long walk."

"Mr. De Brunier will have something to say about
that after last night's blizzard," returned Louison.

"Then please tell him it is my duty to go, for I am
afraid an old Indian woman, who was very kind to me,
was out in last night's snow, and I must go and look
for her.  Will you just undo that door and let me out?"

"Not quite so fast; I have two minds about that,"
answered Louison.  "Better wait for Mr. De Brunier.
I know I shall be wrong if I let you go off like this."

"How can you be wrong?" retorted Wilfred.  "I
came to this place to warn you all there was a party
of Blackfeet hidden in the reeds.  Well, if I had
waited, what good would it have been to you?  Now
I find the old squaw who made me these gloves was
out in last night's snow, and I must go and look for
her, and go directly."

"But a boy like you will never find her," laughed
Louison.

"I'll try it," said Wilfred doggedly.

"Was she a Blackfoot?"

"Yes."

"Then she is safe enough in camp, depend upon it,"
returned Louison.

"No, she was left behind," persisted Wilfred.

"Then come with me," said Louison, by no means
sorry to have found a friendly reason for approaching
the Blackfeet camp.  "I have a little bit of scout
business in hand, just to find out whether these wild
fellows are moving on, or whether they mean waiting
about to pay us another visit."

Chirag was clearing away the snow in the enclosure
outside.  Wilfred found the kettle and the skin just
where he had laid them down, inside the first shed.
He called up Yula, and started by Louison's side.
Chirag was waiting to bar the gate behind them.

"Beautiful morning," said the Canadians, vigorously
rubbing their noses to keep them from freezing, and
violently clapping their mittened hands together.
The snow lay white and level, over hill and marsh,
one sparkling sheet of silvery sheen.  The edging of
ice was broadening along the river, and the roar of
the falls came with a thunderous boom through the
all-pervading stillness around them.

The snow was already hard, as the two ran briskly
forward, with Yula careering and bounding in
extravagant delight.

Wilfred looked back to the little fort, with its
stout wooden walls, twice the height of a man, hiding
the low white house with its roof of bark, hiding
everything within but the rough lookout and the
tall flag-staff, for

   |  "Ever above the topmost roof the banner of England blew."
   |

Wilfred was picturing the feelings with which the
De Bruniers had worked on beneath it, giving the
same faithful service to their foreign masters that
they had to the country which had cast them off.

"It is a dirty old rag," said Louison; "gone all to
ribbons in last night's gale.  But it is good enough for
a little place like this—we call it Hungry Hall.  We
don't keep it open all the year round.  Just now, in
October, the Indians and the hunters are bringing in
the produce of their summer's hunting.  We shall
shut up soon, and open later again for the winter trade."

"A dirty old rag!" repeated Wilfred.  "Yes, but
I am prouder of it than ever, for it means protection
and safety wherever it floats.  Boy as I am, I can
see that."

"Can you see something else," asked Louison—"the
crossing poles of the first wigwam?  We are
at the camp."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE DOG-SLED`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X.


.. class:: center large bold

   *THE DOG-SLED.*

.. vspace:: 2

A cloud of smoke from its many wigwam fires
overhung the Indian camp as Louison and
Wilfred drew near.  The hunter's son, with his quick
ear, stole cautiously through the belt of pine trees
which sheltered it from the north wind, listening for
any sounds of awakening life.  Yesterday's adventure
had no doubt been followed by a prolonged feast,
and men and dogs were still sleeping.  A few squaws,
upon whom the hard work of the Indian world all
devolves, were already astir.  Louison thought they
were gathering firewood outside the camp.  This was
well.  Louison hung round about the outskirts,
watching their proceedings, until he saw one woman behind
a wigwam gathering snow to fill her kettle.  Her
pappoose in its wooden cradle was strapped to her
back; but she had seen or heard them, for she paused
in her occupation and looked up wondering.

Louison stepped forward.

"Now for your questions, my boy," he said to
Wilfred, "and I will play interpreter."

"Is there an old squaw in your camp named the
Far-off-Dawn?"

Wilfred needed no interpreter to explain the
"caween" given in reply.

"Tell her, Louison," he hurried on, "she was with
me the night before last.  I thought she left me to
follow this trail.  If she has not reached this camp,
she must be lost in the snow."

"Will not some of your people go and look for
her," added Louison, on his own account, "before you
move on?"

"What is the use?" she asked.  "Death will have
got her by this time.  She came to the camp; she was
too old to travel.  If she is alive, she may overtake
us again.  We shall not move on until another
sunrising, to rest the horses."

"Then I shall go and look for her," said Wilfred
resolutely.

"Not you," retorted Louison; "wait a bit."  He put
his hand in his pockets.  They had been well filled
with tea and tobacco, in readiness for any emergency.
"Is not there anybody in the camp who will go and
look for her?"

Louison was asking his questions for the sake of
the information he elicited, but Wilfred caught at
the idea in earnest.  "Go and see," urged Louison,
offering her a handful of his tea.

"Thé!" she repeated.  The magic word did wonders.
Louison knew if one of the men were willing to leave the
camp to look for Pe-na-Koam, no further mischief was
intended.  But if they were anticipating a repetition of
"the high old time" they had enjoyed yesterday, not one
of them could be induced to forego their portion in so
congenial a lark, for in their eyes it was nothing more.

The squaw took the tea in both her hands, gladly
leaving her kettle in the snow, as she led the way
into the camp.

Wilfred, who had only seen the poor little canvas
tents of the Crees, looked round him in astonishment.
In the centre stood the lodge or moya of the chief—a
wigwam built in true old Indian style, fourteen
feet high at the least.  Twelve strong poles were
stuck in the ground, round a circle fifteen feet across.
They were tied together at the top, and the outside
was covered with buffalo-skins, painted black and
red in all sorts of figures.  Eagles seemed perching
on the heads of deers, and serpents twisted and coiled
beneath the feet of buffaloes.  The other wigwams
built around it were in the same style, on a smaller
scale, all brown with smoke.

A goodly array of spears, bows, and shields adorned
the outside of the moya; above them the much-coveted
rifles were ranged with exceeding pride.  The ground
between the moya and the tents was littered with
chips and bones, among which the dogs were busy.
A few children were pelting each other with the
snow, or trying to shoot at the busy jays with a baby
of a bow and arrows to match.

Louison pushed aside the fur which hung over the
entrance to the moya—the man-hole—and stepped
inside.  A beautiful fire was burning in the middle
of the tent.  The floor was strewed with pine brush,
and skins were hung round the inside wall, like a
dado.  They fitted very closely to the ground, so as
to keep out all draught.  The rabbits and swans, the
buzzards and squirrels painted on this dado were so
lifelike, Wilfred thought it must be as good as a
picture-book to the dear little pappoose, strapped to
its flat board cradle, and set upright against the wall
whilst mother was busy.  The sleeping-places were
divided by wicker-screens, and seemed furnished with
plenty of blankets and skins.  One or two of them
were still occupied; but Oma-ka-pee-mulkee-yeu lay
on a bear-skin by the fire, with his numerous pipes
arranged beside him.  The squaw explained the errand
of their early visitors: a woman was lost in the snow,
would the chief send one of his people to find her?

The Great Swan looked over his shoulder and said
something.  A young man rose up from one of the
sleeping-places.

Both were asking, "What was the good?"

"She is one of your own people," urged Louison.
"We came to tell you."

This was not what Wilfred had said, and it was
not all he wanted, but he was forced to trust it to
Louison, although he was uneasy.

He could see plainly enough an Indian would be
far more likely to find her than himself, but would
they?  Would any of them go?

Louison offered a taste of his tobacco to the old
chief and the young, by way of good-fellowship.

"They will never do it for that," thought Wilfred
growing desperate again.  He had but one thing
about him he could offer as an inducement, and that
was his knife.  He hesitated a moment.  He thought
of Pe-na-Koam dying in the snow, and held it out to
the young chieftain.

The dusky fingers gripped the handle.

"Will you take care of her and bring her here, or
give her food and build up her hut?" asked Wilfred,
making his meaning as plain as he could, by the help
of nods and looks and signs.

The young chief was outside the man-hole in
another moment.  He slung his quiver to his belt and
took down his bow, flung a stout blanket over his
shoulder, and shouted to his squaw to catch a bronco,
the usual name for the Canadian horse.  The kettle
was in his hand.

"Can we trust him?" asked Wilfred, as he left
the camp by Louison's side.

"Trust him! yes," answered his companion.  "Young
Sapoo is one of those Indians who never break faith.
His word once given, he will keep it to the death."

"Then I have only to pray that he may be in time,"
said Wilfred gravely, as he stood still to watch the wild
red man galloping back to the beavers' lakelet.

"Oh, he will be in time," returned Louison
cheerily.  "All their wigwam poles would be left
standing, and plenty of pine brush and firewood
strewing about.  She is sure to have found some
shelter before the heaviest fall of snow; that did
not come until it was nearly morning."

Gaspé had climbed the lookout to watch for their
return.

"Wilfred, *mon cher*," he exclaimed, "you must
have a perfect penchant for running away.  How
could you give us the slip in such a shabby fashion?
I could not believe Chirag.  If the bears were not
all dropping off into their winter sleep, I should have
thought some hungry bruin had breakfasted upon you."

Gaspé's grandfather had turned carpenter, and was
already at work mending his broken doors.  Not
being a very experienced workman, his planking and
his panelling did not square.  Wood was plentiful, and
more than one piece was thrown aside as a misfit.  Both
the boys were eager to assist in the work of restoration.
A broken shelf was mended between them—in first-rate
workmanly style, as Wilfred really thought.  "We
have done that well," they agreed; and when Mr. De
Brunier—who was still chipping at his refractory
panel—added a note of commendation to their labours, Gaspé's
spirits ran up to the very top of the mental thermometer.

To recover his balance—for Wilfred unceremoniously
declared he was off his head—Gaspé fell into a
musing fit.  He wakened up, exclaiming,—

"I'm flying high!"

"Then mind you don't fall," retorted Mr. De
Brunier, who himself was cogitating somewhat darkly
over Louison's intelligence.  "There will be no peace
for me," he said, "no security, whilst these Blackfeet
are in the neighbourhood.  'Wait for another
sun-rising'—that means another forty-eight hours of
incessant vigilance for me.  It was want of confidence
did it all.  I should teach them to trust me in time,
but it cannot be done in a day."

As he moved on, lamenting over the scene of
destruction, Gaspé laid a hand on Wilfred's arm.  "How
are you going to keep pace with the hunters with
that lame foot?" he demanded.

"As the tortoise did with the hare," laughed Wilfred.
"Get myself left behind often enough, I don't doubt
that."

"But I doubt if you will ever get to your home
*à la tortoise*," rejoined Gaspé.  "No, walking will
never do for you.  I am thinking of making you
a sled."

"A sledge!" repeated Wilfred in surprise.

"Oh, we drop the 'ge' you add to it in your
English dictionaries," retorted Gaspé.  "We only say
sled out here.  There will be plenty of board when
grandfather has done his mending.  We may have
what we want, I'm sure.  Your dog is a trained
hauler, and why shouldn't we teach my biggest pup
to draw with him?  They would drag you after the
hunters in fine style.  We can do it all, even to their
jingling bells."

Wilfred, who had been accustomed to the light and
graceful carioles and sledges used in the Canadian
towns, thought it was flying a bit too high.  But
Gaspé, up in all the rough-and-ready contrivances of
the backwoods, knew what he was about.  Louison
and Chirag had to be consulted.

When all the defences were put in order—bolts,
bars, and padlocks doubled and trebled, and a rough
but very ponderous double door added to the
storeroom—Mr. De Brunier began to speak of rest.

"The night cometh in which no man can work," he
quoted, as if in justification of the necessary stoppage.

The hammer was laid down, and he sank back in
his hard chair, as if he were almost ashamed to
indulge in his one solace, the well-filled pipe Gaspé
was placing so coaxingly in his fingers.  A few
sedative whiffs were enjoyed in silence; but before
the boys were sent off to bed, Gaspé had secured the
reversion of all the wooden remains of the carpentering
bout, and as many nails as might be reasonably
required.

"Now," said Gaspé, as he tucked himself up by
Wilfred's side, and pulled the coverings well over
head and ears, "I'll show you what I can do."

Three days passed quickly by.  On the morning
of the fourth Louison walked in with a long face.
The new horse, the gift of the Blackfoot chief, had
vanished in the night.  The camp had moved on,
nothing but the long poles of the wigwams were left
standing.

The loss of a horse is such an everyday occurrence
in Canada, where horses are so often left to take care
of themselves, it was by no means clear that
Oma-ka-pee-mulkee-yeu had resumed his gift, but it was highly
probable.

Notwithstanding, the Company had not been losers
by the riotous marketing, for the furs the Blackfeet
had brought in were splendid.

"Yes, we were all on our guard—thanks to you, my
little man—or it might have ended in the demolition
of the fort," remarked Mr. De Brunier.  "Now, if
there is anything you want for your journey, tell me,
and you shall have it."

"Yes, grandfather," interposed Gaspé.  "He must
have a blanket to sleep in, and there is the harness
for the dogs, and a lot of things."

Wilfred grew hot.  "Please, sir, thanks; but I don't
think I want much.  Most of all, perhaps, something
to eat."

Mr. De Brunier recommended a good hunch of
pemmican, to cut and come again.  The hunters would
let him mess with them if he brought his own pemmican
and a handful of tea to throw into their boiling
kettle.  The hunters' camp was about sixty miles
from Hungry Hall.  They would be two or three
days on the road.

More than one party of hunters had called at the
fort already, wanting powder and ball, matches, and a
knife; and when the lynx and marten and wolf skins
which they brought were told up, and the few necessaries
they required were provided, the gay, careless,
improvident fellows would invest in a tasselled cap
bright with glittering beads.

The longer Wilfred stayed at the fort, the more
Mr. De Brunier hesitated about letting the boy start
for so long a journey with no better protection.
Gaspard never failed to paint the danger and
magnify the difficulties of the undertaking, wishing to
keep his new friend a little longer.  But Wilfred was
steady to his purpose.  He saw no other chance of
getting back to his home.  He did not say much
when Mr. De Brunier and Gaspé were weighing
chances and probabilities, hoping some travelling party
from the north might stop by the way at Hungry
Hall and take him on with them.  Such things did
happen occasionally.

But Wilfred had a vivid recollection of his
cross-country journey with Forgill.  He could not see that
he should be sure of getting home if he accepted
Mr. De Brunier's offer and stayed until the river was
frozen and then went down with him to their
mid-winter station, trusting to a seat in some of the
Company's carts or the Company's sledges to their
next destination.

Then there would be waiting and trusting again to
be sent on another stage, and another, and another,
until he would at last find himself at Fort Garry.
"Then," he asked, "what was he to do?  If his
uncle and aunt knew that he was there, they might
send Forgill again to fetch him.  But if letters reached
Acland's Hut so uncertainly, how was he to let them
know?"

As Wilfred worked the matter out thus in his own
mind, he received every proposition of Mr. De Brunier's
with, "Please, sir, I'd rather go to Bowkett.  He lost
me.  He will be sure to take me straight home."

"The boy knew his own mind so thoroughly," Mr. De
Brunier told Gaspard at last, "they must let him
have his own way."

The sled was finished.  It was a simple affair—two
thin boards about four feet long nailed together
edgeways, with a tri-cornered piece of wood fitted in
at the end.  Two old skates were screwed on the
bottom, and the thing was done.  The boys worked
together at the harness as they sat round the stove in
the evening.  The snow was thicker, the frost was
harder every night.  Ice had settled on the quiet
pools, and was spreading over the quick-running
streams, but the dash of the falls still resisted its
ever-encroaching influence.  By-and-by they too
must yield, and the whole face of nature would be
locked in its iron clasp.  November was wearing
away.  A sunny morning came now and then to
cheer the little party so soon to separate.

Gaspé proposed a run with the dogs, just to try
how they would go in their new harness, and if, after
all, the sled would run as a sled should.

Other things were set aside, and boys and men
gathered in the court.  Even Mr. De Brunier stepped
out to give his opinion about the puppies.  Gaspé had
named them from the many tongues of his native
Canada.

In his heart Wilfred entertained a secret belief that
not one of them would ever be equal to his Yula.
They were Athabascans.  They would never be as big
for one thing, and no dog ever could be half as
intelligent; that was not possible.  But he did not give
utterance to these sentiments.  It would have looked
so ungrateful, when Gaspé was designing the best and
biggest for his parting gift.  And they were beauties,
all four of them.

There was Le Chevalier, so named because he never
appeared, as Gaspé declared, without his white
shirtfront and white gloves.  Then there was his bluff
old English Boxer, the sturdiest of the four.  He
looked like a hauler.  Kusky-tay-ka-atim-moos, or
"the little black dog," according to the Cree dialect,
had struck up a friendship with Yula, only a little
less warm than that which existed between their
respective masters.  Then the little schemer with the
party-coloured face was Yankee-doodle.

"Try them all in harness, and see which runs the
best," suggested grandfather, quite glad that his
Gaspard should have one bright holiday to checker the
leaden dulness of the everyday life at Hungry Hall.

Louison was harnessing the team.  He nailed two
long strips of leather to the lowest end of the sled for
traces.  The dogs' collars were made of soft leather,
and slipped over the head.  Each one was ornamented
with a little tinkling bell under the chin and a tuft of
bright ribbon at the back of the ear, and a buckle on
either side through which the traces were passed.  A
band of leather round the dogs completed the harness,
and to this the traces were also securely buckled.
The dogs stood one before the other, about a foot apart.

Yula was an experienced hand, and took the collar
as a matter of course.  Yankee was the first of the
puppies to stand in the traces, and his severe doggie
tastes were completely outraged by the amount of
finery Gaspé and Louison seemed to think necessary
for their proper appearance.

Wilfred was seated on a folded blanket, with a
buffalo-robe tucked over his feet.  Louison flourished
a whip in the air to make the dogs start.  Away
went Yula with something of the velocity of an arrow
from a bow, knocking down Gaspé, who thought of
holding the back of the sled to guide it.

He scrambled to his feet and ran after it.  Yula
was careering over the snow at racehorse speed, ten
miles an hour, and poor little Yankee, almost frightened
out of his senses, was bent upon making a dash at the
ribbon waving so enticingly before his eyes.  He
darted forward.  He hung back.  He lurched from
side to side.  He twisted, he turned.  He upset the
equilibrium of the sledge.  It banged against a tree
on one side, and all but tilted over on the other.  One
end went down into a badger hole, leaving Wilfred
and his blanket in a heap on the snow, when Yankee,
lightened of half his load, fairly leaped upon Yula's
back and hopelessly entangled the traces.  The boys
concealed an uneasy sense of ignominious failure
under an assertion calculated to put as good a face as
they could on the matter: "We have not got it quite
right yet, but we shall."





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.. _`THE HUNTERS' CAMP`:

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   CHAPTER XI.


.. class:: center large bold

   *THE HUNTERS' CAMP.*

.. vspace:: 2

A burst of merry laughter made the two boys
look round, half afraid that it might be at
their own expense.

Wilfred felt a bit annoyed when he perceived a
little party of horsemen spurring towards the fort.
But Gaspé ran after them, waving his arms with a
bonjour as he recognized his own Louison's cousin,
Batiste, among the foremost.

Dog training and dog driving are the never-failing
topics of interest among the hunters and trappers.
Batiste had reined in his horse to watch the ineffectual
efforts of the boys to disentangle the two dogs, who
were fighting and snarling with each other over the
upturned sled.

Batiste and his comrades soon advanced from
watching to helping.  The sled was lifted up, the
traces disentangled, and Wilfred and Gaspé were told
and made to feel that they knew nothing at all
about dog driving, and might find themselves in a
heap all pell-mell at the bottom of the river bank
some day if they set about it in such a reckless
fashion.  They were letting the dogs run just where
they liked.  Dogs wanted something to follow.
Batiste jumped from his horse at last, quite unable
to resist the pleasure of breaking in a young dog.

"It takes two to manage a dog team," he asserted.
"It wants a man in snow-shoes to walk on in front
and mark a track, and another behind to keep them
steady to their work."

Dogs, horses, men, and boys all turned back together
to discuss Yankee's undeveloped powers.  But
no, Batiste himself could do nothing with him.
Yankee refused to haul.

"I'll make him," said Batiste.

But Gaspé preferred to take his dog out of the
traces rather than surrender him to the tender mercies
of a hunter.  "I know they are very cruel," he
whispered to Wilfred.  So Yula was left to draw
the empty sled back to the fort, and he did it in
first-rate style.

"He is just cut out for hauling, as the hound is for
hunting," explained Batiste.  "It is not any dog can
do it."

They entered the gate of the fort.  The men stood
patting and praising Yula, while Batiste exchanged
greetings with his cousin.

Before he unlocked the door of his shop, Mr. De
Brunier called Wilfred to him.

"Now is your chance, my boy," he said kindly.
"Batiste tells me he passed this Bowkett on his way
to the camp, so you are sure to find him there.  Shall
I arrange with Batiste to take you with him?"

The opportunity had come so suddenly at last.
If Wilfred had any misgiving, he did not show it.

"What do you think I had better do, sir?" he asked.

"There is so much good common sense in your own
plan," answered his friend, "I think you had better
follow it.  When we shut up, you cannot remain
here; and unless we take you with us, this is the best
thing to do."

Wilfred put both his hands in Mr. De Brunier's.

"I can't thank you," he said; "I can't thank you
half enough."

"Never mind the thanks, my boy.  Now I want
you to promise me, when you get back to your home,
you will make yourself missed, then you will soon find
yourself wanted."  Mr. De Brunier turned the key in
the lock as he spoke, and went in.

Wilfred crossed the court to Gaspé.  He looked
up brightly, exclaiming, "Kusky is the boy for you;
they all say Kusky will draw."

"I am going," whispered Wilfred.

"Going! how and why?" echoed Gaspé in consternation.

"With these men," answered Wilfred.

"Then I shall hate Batiste if he takes you from
me!" exclaimed Gaspé impetuously.

They stepped back into the shed the puppies had
occupied, behind some packing-cases, where nobody
could see them, for the parting words.

"We shall never forget each other, never.  Shall
we ever meet again?" asked Wilfred despairingly.
"We may when we are men."

"We may before," whispered Gaspé, trying to
comfort him.  "Grandfather's time is up this Christmas.
Then he will take his pension and retire.  He talks
of buying a farm.  Why shouldn't it be near your
uncle's?"

"Come, Gaspard, what are you about?" shouted
Mr. De Brunier from the shop door.  "Take Wilfred
in, and see that he has a good dinner."

Words failed over the knife and fork.  Yula and
Kusky had to be fed.

"Will the sled be of any use?" asked Gaspé.

Even Wilfred did not feel sure.  They had fallen
very low—had no heart for anything.

Louison was packing the sled—pemmican and tea
for three days.

"Put plenty," said Gaspé, as he ran out to see all
was right.

Louison and Batiste were talking.

"We'll teach that young dog to haul," Batiste was
saying; "and if the boy gets tired of them, we'll take
them off his hands altogether."

"With pleasure," added Louison, and they both laughed.

The last moment had come.

"Good-bye, good-bye!" said Wilfred, determined not
to break down before the men, who were already
mounting their horses.

"God bless you!" murmured Gaspé.

Batiste put Wilfred on his horse, and undertook the
management of the sled.  The unexpected pleasure of
a ride helped to soften the pain of parting.

"I ought to be thankful," thought Wilfred—"I
ought to rejoice that the chance I have longed for has
come.  I ought to be grateful that I have a home,
and such a good home."  But it was all too new.  No
one had learned to love him there.  Whose hand
would clasp his when he reached Acland's Hut as
Gaspé had done?

On, on, over the wide, wild waste of sparkling
snow, with his jovial companions laughing and talking
around him.  It was so similar to his ride with
Bowkett and Diomé, save for the increase in the cold.
He did not mind that.

But there was one thing Wilfred did mind, and
that was the hard blows Batiste was raining down
on Kusky and Yula.  He sprang down to remonstrate.
He wanted to drive them himself.  He was laughed
at for a self-conceited jackass, and pushed aside.

Dog driving was the hunter's hobby.  The whole
party were engrossed in watching Yula's progress, and
quiet, affectionate little Kusky's infantine endeavours
to keep up with him.

Batiste regarded himself as a crack trainer, and
when poor Kusky brought the whole cavalcade to a
standstill by sitting down in the midst of his traces,
he announced his intention of curing him of such a
trick with his first taste.

"Send him to Rome," shouted one of the foremost
of the hunters.  "He'll not forget that in a hurry."

"He is worth training well," observed another.
"See what a chest he has.  He will make as good a
hauler as the old one by-and-by.  Pay him well first
start."

What "sending to Rome" might mean Wilfred did
not stay to see.  Enough to know it was the
uttermost depth of dog disgrace.  He saw Batiste double
up his fist and raise his arm.  The sprain in his
ankle was forgotten.  He flew to the ground, and
dashed between Batiste and his dogs, exclaiming,
"They are mine, my own, and they shan't be hurt
by anybody!"

He caught the first blow, that was all.  He staggered
backwards on the slippery ground.

Another of the hunters had alighted.  He caught
Wilfred by the arm, and pulled him up, observing
dryly, "Well done, young 'un.  Got a settler unawares.
That just comes of interfering.—Here, Mathurin, take
him up behind ye."

The hunter appealed to wheeled round with a
good-natured laugh.

But Wilfred could not stand; the horses, dogs,
and snow seemed dancing round him.

"Yula!  Kusky!" he called, like one speaking in a
dream.

But Yula, dragging the sled behind him, and rolling
Kusky over and over in the tangling harness, had
sprung at Batiste's arm; but he was too hampered to
seize him.  Wilfred was only aware of a confused
*mêlée* as he was hoisted into Mathurin's strong arms
and trotted away from the scene of action.

"Come, you are the sauciest young dog of the
three," said Mathurin rather admiringly.  "There, lay
your head on me.  You'll have to sleep this off a
bit," he continued, gently walking his horse, and
gradually dropping behind the rest of the party.

Poor Wilfred roused up every now and then with
a rather wild and incoherent inquiry for his dogs, to
which Mathurin replied with a drawling, sleepy-sounding
"All right."

Wilfred's eyes were so swollen over that he hardly
knew it was starshine when Mathurin laid him down
by a new-lit camping-fire.

"There," said the hunter, in the self-congratulatory
tone of a man who knows he has got over an awkward
piece of business; "let him have his dogs, and give
him a cup of tea, and he'll be himself again by the
morning."

"Ready for the same game?" asked Batiste, who
was presiding over the tea-kettle.

The cup which Mathurin recommended was poured
out; the sugar was not spared.  Wilfred drank it
gladly without speaking.  When words were useless
silence seemed golden.  Yula was on guard beside
him, and poor little Kusky, cowed and cringing, was
shivering at his feet.  They covered him up, and all
he had seen and heard seemed as unreal as his dreams.

The now familiar cry of "*Lève! lève!*" made Yula
sit upright.  The hunters were astir before the dawn,
but Wilfred was left undisturbed for another hour at
least, until the rubeiboo was ready—that is, pemmican
boiled in water until it makes a sort of soup.  Pemmican,
as Mr. De Brunier had said, was the hunters'
favourite food.

"Now for the best of the breakfast for the lame
and tame," laughed Batiste, pulling up Wilfred, and
looking at his disfiguring bruises with a whistle.

Wilfred shrank from the prospect before him.
Another day of bitter biting cold, and merciless cruelty
to his poor dogs.  "Oh, if Gaspé knew!—if Kusky
could but have run back home!"

Wilfred could not eat much.  He gave his breakfast
to his dogs, and fondled them in silence.  It was
enough to make a fellow's blood boil to be called
Mathurin's babby, *l'enfant endormi* (sleepy child),
and Pierre the pretty face.

"Can we be such stoics, Yula," he whispered, "as
to stand all this another twenty-four hours, and see
our poor little Kusky beaten right and left?  Can
we bear it till to-morrow morning?"

Yula washed the nervous fingers stroking his hair
out of his eyes, and looked the picture of patient
endurance.  There was no escape, but it could not
last long.  Wilfred set his teeth, and asserted no one
but himself should put the harness on his dogs.

"Gently, my little turkey-cock," put in Mathurin.
"The puppy may be your own, but the stray belongs
to a friend of mine, who will be glad enough to see
him back again."

Wilfred was fairly frightened now.  "Oh, if he
had to give his Yula chummie back to some horrid
stranger!"  He thought it would be the last straw
which brings the breakdown to boy as well as camel.
But he consoled himself at their journey's end.
Bowkett would interfere on his behalf.  Mathurin's
assertion was not true, by the twinkle in his eye and the
laugh to his companions.  Louison must have told his
cousin that Yula was a stray, or they would never
have guessed it.  True or false, the danger of losing
his dog was a real one.  They meant to take it from
him.  One thing Wilfred had the sense to see, getting
in a passion was of no good anyway.  "Frederick the
Great lost his battle when he lost his temper," he
thought.  "Keep mine for Yula's sake I will."

But the work was harder than he expected, although
the time was shorter.  The hardy broncos of the hunters
were as untiring as their masters.  Ten, twenty, thirty
miles were got over without a sign of weariness from
any one but Wilfred and Kusky.  If they were dead
beat, what did it matter?  The dog was lashed along,
and Wilfred was teased, to keep him from falling
asleep.

"One more push," said the hunters, "and instead of
sleeping with our feet to a camp-fire, and our beards
freezing to the blankets, we shall be footing it to
Bowkett's fiddle."

The moon had risen clear and bright above the
sleeping clouds still darkening the horizon.  A silent
planet burned lamp-like in the western sky.  Forest
and prairie, ridges and lowland, were sparkling in
the sheen of the moonlight and the snow.

Wilfred roused himself.  The tinkle of the
dog-bells was growing fainter and fainter, as Mathurin
galloped into the midst of a score or so of huts
promiscuously crowded together, while many a high-piled
meat-stage gave promise of a winter's plenty.  Huge
bones and horns, the remnants of yesterday's feast,
were everywhere strewing the ground, and changing
its snowy carpet to a dingy drab.  There were
wolf-skins spread over framework.  There were
buffalo-skins to be smoked, and buffalo-robes—as they are
called when the hair is left on—stretched out to dry.
Men and horses, dogs and boys, women drawing water
or carrying wood, jostled each other.  There was a
glow of firelight from many a parchment window,
and here and there the sound of a fiddle, scraped by
some rough hunter's hand, and the quick thud of the
jovial hunter's heel upon the earthen floor.

It resembled nothing in the old world so much as
an Irish fair, with its shouts of laughter and snatches
of song, and that sense of inextricable confusion,
heightened by the all too frequent fight in a most
inconvenient corner.  The rule of contrary found a
notable example in the name bestowed upon this
charming locality.  A French missionary had once
resided on the spot, so it was still called La Mission.

Mathurin drew up before one of the biggest of the
huts, where the sounds of mirth were loudest, and the
light streamed brightest on the bank of snow beside
the door.

"Here we are!" he exclaimed, swinging Wilfred
from the saddle to the threshold.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`MAXICA'S WARNING`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII.


.. class:: center large bold

   *MAXICA'S WARNING.*

.. vspace:: 2

Mathurin knocked at the door.  It was on
the latch.  He pushed Wilfred inside; but
the boy was stubborn.

"No, no, I won't go in; I'll stand outside and wait
for the others," he said.  "I want my dogs."

"But the little 'un's dead beat.  You would not
have him hurried.  I am going back to meet them,"
laughed Mathurin, proud of the neat way in which
he had slipped out of all explanation of the blow
Wilfred had received, which Bowkett might make
awkward.

He was in the saddle and off again in a moment,
leaving Wilfred standing at the half-open door.

"This is nothing but a dodge to get my dogs away
from me," thought the boy, unwilling to go inside the
hut without them.

"I am landed at last," he sighed, with a grateful sense
of relief, as he heard Bowkett's voice in the pause of
the dance.  His words were received with bursts of
laughter.  But what was he saying?

"It all came about through the loss of the boy.
There was lamentation and mourning and woe when
I went back without him.  The auntie would have
given her eyes to find him.  See my gain by the
endeavour.  As hope grew beautifully less, it dwindled
down to 'Bring me some certain tidings of his fate,
and there is nothing I can refuse you.'  As luck would
have it, I came across a Blackfoot wearing the very
knife we stuck in the poor boy's belt before we started.
I was not slow in bartering for an exchange; and
when I ride next to Acland's Hut, it is but to change
horses and prepare for a longer drive to the nearest
church.  So, friends, I invite you all to dance at my
wedding feast.  Less than three days of it won't
content a hunter."

A cheer went up from the noisy dancers, already
calling for the fiddles.

Bowkett paused with the bow upraised.  There
stood Wilfred, like the skeleton at the feast, in the
open doorway before him.

"If you have not found me, I have found you,
Mr. Bowkett," he was saying.  "I am the lost boy.
I am Wilfred Acland."

The dark brow of the handsome young hunter
contracted with angry dismay.

"Begone!" he exclaimed, with a toss of his head.
"You!  I know nothing of you!  What business have
you here?"

Hugh Bowkett turned his back upon Wilfred, and
fiddled away more noisily than before.  Two or three
of his friends who stood nearest to him—men whom
it would not have been pleasant to meet alone in the
darkness of the night—closed round him as the dance
began.

"A coyote in your lamb's-skin," laughed one, "on
the lookout for a supper."

A coyote is a little wolfish creature, a most
impudent thief, for ever prowling round the winter
camps, nibbling at the skins and watching the
meat-stage, fought off by the dogs and trapped like a rat
by the hunters.

Wilfred looked round for Diomé.  He might have
recognized him; but no Diomé was there.

Was there not one among the merry fellows
tripping before him, not one that had ever seen him
before?  He knew he was sadly changed.  His face
was still swollen from the disfiguring blow.  Could
he wonder if Bowkett did not know him?  Should
he run back and call the men who had brought him
to his assistance?  He hated them, every one.  He
was writhing still under every lash which had fallen
on poor Kusky's sides.  Turn to them? no, never!
His dogs would be taken as payment for any help
that they might give.  He would reason it out.  He
would convince Bowkett he was the same boy.

Three or four Indians entered behind him, and
seated themselves on the floor, waiting for something
to eat.  He knew their silent way of begging for
food when they thought that food was plentiful in
the camp: the high-piled meat-stage had drawn them.
It was such an ordinary thing Wilfred paid no heed
to them.  He was bent on making Bowkett listen;
and yet he was afraid to leave the door, for fear of
missing his dogs.

"A word in your ear," said the most ill-looking of
the hunters standing by Bowkett's fiddle, trusting to
the noise of the music to drown his words from every
one but him for whom they were intended.  "You and
I have been over the border together, sharpened up a
bit among the Yankee bowie-knives.  You are counting
Caleb Acland as a dead man.  You are expecting,
as his sister's husband, to step into his shoes.  Back
comes this boy and sweeps the stakes out of your
very hand.  He'll stand first."

"I know it," retorted Bowkett with a scowl.  "But,"
he added hurriedly, "it is not he."

"Oh, it isn't the boy you lost?  Of course not.
But take my advice, turn this impudent young coyote
out into the snow.  One midnight's frost will save you
from any more bother.  There are plenty of badger
holes where he can rest safe and snug till doomsday."

Bowkett would not venture a reply.  The low aside
was unnoticed by the dancers; not the faintest breath
could reach Wilfred, vainly endeavouring to pass
between the whirling groups to Bowkett's side; but
every syllable was caught by the quick ear of one of
the Indians on the floor.

He picked up a tiny splinter of wood from the
hearth, near which he was sitting; another was
secreted.  There were three in the hollow of his
hand.  Noiselessly and unobtrusively he stole behind
the dancers.  A gentle pull at Wilfred's coat made
him look up into the half-blind eyes of Maxica the Cree.

Not a word was said.  Maxica turned from him
and seated himself once more on the ground, in which
he deliberately stuck his three pegs.

Wilfred could not make out what he was going to
do, but his heart felt lighter at the sight of him; "for,"
he thought, "he will confirm my story.  He will tell
Bowkett how he found me by the banks of the
dried-up river."  He dropped on the floor beside the
wandering Cree.  But the Indian laid a finger on his lips,
and one of his pegs was pressed on Wilfred's palm;
another was pointed towards Bowkett.  The third,
which was a little charred, and therefore blackened,
was turned to the door, which Wilfred had left open,
to the darkness without, from whence, according to
Indian belief, the evil spirits come.

Then Maxica took the three pegs and moved them
rapidly about the floor.  The black peg and Bowkett's
peg were always close together, rubbing against each
other until both were as black as a piece of charcoal.
It was clear they were pursuing the other peg—which
Wilfred took for himself—from corner to corner.  At
last it was knocked down under them, driven right
into the earthen floor, and the two blackened pegs
were left sticking upright over it.

Wilfred laid his hand softly on Maxica's knee, to
show his warning was understood.

But what then?

Maxica got up and glided out of the hut as noiselessly
as he had entered it.  The black-browed hunter
whispering at Bowkett's elbow made his way through
the dancers towards Wilfred with a menacing air.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"Waiting to speak to Mr. Bowkett," replied Wilfred
stoutly.

"Then you may wait for him on the snow-bank,"
retorted the hunter, seizing Wilfred by the collar and
flinging him out of the door.

"What is that for?" asked several of the dancers.

"I'll vow it is the same young imp who passed us
with a party of miners coming from a summer's work
in the Rocky Mountains, who stole my dinner from
the spit," he went on, working himself into the
semblance of a passion.  "I marked him with a rare
black eye before we parted then, and I'll give him
another if he shows his face again where I am."

"It is false!" cried Wilfred, rising up in the heat
of his indignation.

His tormentor came a step or two from the door, and
gathering up a great lump of snow, hurled it at him.

Wilfred escaped from the avalanche, and the mocking
laughter which accompanied it, to the sheltering
darkness.  He paused among the sombre shadows
thrown by the wall of the opposite hut.  Maxica
was waiting for him under its pine-bark eaves,
surveying the cloudless heavens.

"He speaks with a forked tongue," said the Cree,
pointing to the man in the doorway, and dividing his
fingers, to show that thoughts went one way and
words another.

The scorn of the savage beside him was balm to
Wilfred.  The touch of sympathy which makes the
whole world kin drew them together.  But between
him and the hunter swaggering on the snow-bank
there was a moral gulf nothing could bridge over.
There was a sense—a strange sense—of deliverance.
What would it have been to live on with such men,
touching their pitch, and feeling himself becoming
blackened?  That was the uttermost depth from which
this fellow's mistake had saved him.

It was no mistake, as Maxica was quick to show
him, but deliberate purpose.  Then Wilfred gave up
every hope of getting back to his home.  All was lost
to him—even his dogs were gone.

He tried to persuade Maxica to walk round the
huts with him, to find out where they were.  But
the Cree was resolute to get him away as fast as
he could beyond the reach of Bowkett and his
companions.  He expected that great lump of snow would
be followed by a stone; that their steps would be
dogged until they reached the open, when—he did not
particularize the precise form that when was likeliest
to assume.  The experiences of his wild, wandering
life suggested dangers that could not occur to Wilfred.
There must be no boyish footprint in the snow to
tell which way they were going.  Maxica wrapped his
blanket round Wilfred, and threw him over his
shoulder as if he had been a heavy pack of skins, and
took his way through the noisiest part of the camp,
choosing the route a frightened boy would be the last
to take.  He crossed in front of an outlying hut.
Yula was tied by a strip of leather to one of the
posts supporting its meat-stage, and Kusky to another.
Maxica recognized Yula's bark before Wilfred did.
He muffled the boy's head in the blanket, and drew it
under his arm in such a position that Wilfred could
scarcely either speak or hear.  Then Maxica turned
his course, and left the dogs behind him.  But Yula
could not be deceived.  He bounded forward to the
uttermost length of his tether.  One sniff at the toe
of Wilfred's boot, scarcely visible beneath the blanket,
made him desperate.  He hung at his collar; he tore
up the earth; he dragged at the post, as if, like
another Samson, he would use his unusual strength to
pull down this prison-house.

Maxica, with his long, ungainly Indian stride, was
quickly out of sight.  Then Yula forbore his wailing
howl, and set himself to the tough task of biting
through the leathern thong which secured him.
Fortunately for him, a dog-chain was unattainable in the
hunters' camp.  Time and persistency were safe to set
him free before the daylight.

"I thought you were going to stifle me outright,"
said Wilfred, when Maxica released him.

"I kept you still," returned the Cree.  "There
were ears behind every log."

"Where are we going?" asked Wilfred.

But Maxica had no answer to that question.  He
was stealing over the snow with no more definite
purpose before him than to take the boy away
somewhere beyond the hunters' reach.  A long night walk
was nothing to him.  He could find his way as well
in the dark as in the light.

They were miles from the hunters' camp before he
set Wilfred on his feet or paused to rest.

"You have saved me, Maxica," said Wilfred, in a
low, deep voice.  "You have saved my life from a
greater danger than the snowdrift.  I can only pray
the Good Spirit to reward you."

"I was hunger-bitten, and you gave me beaver-skin,"
returned Maxica.  "Now think; whilst this
bad hunter keeps the gate of your house there is no
going back for you, and you have neither trap nor
bow.  I'll guide you where the hunter will never
follow—across the river to the pathless forest; and
then—" he looked inquiringly, turning his dim eyes
towards the boy.

"Oh, if I were but back in Hungry Hall!" Wilfred
broke forth.

Maxica was leading on to where a poplar thicket
concealed the entrance to a sheltered hollow scooped
on the margin of a frozen stream.  The snow had
fallen from its shelving sides, and lay in white masses,
blocking the entrance from the river.  Giving Wilfred
his hand, Maxica began to descend the slippery steep.
It was one of nature's hiding-places, which Maxica
had frequently visited.  He scooped out his circle in
the frozen snow at the bottom, fetched down the dead
wood from the overhanging trees, and built his fire,
as on the first night of their acquaintance.  But now
the icy walls around them reflected the dancing flames
in a thousand varied hues.  Between the black rocks,
from which the raging winds had swept the recent
snow, a cascade turned to ice hung like a drapery of
crystal lace suspended in mid-air.

It was the second night they had passed together,
with no curtain but the star-lit sky.  Now Maxica
threw the corner of his blanket over Wilfred's
shoulders, and drew him as closely to his side as if he
were his son.  The Cree lit his pipe, and abandoned
himself to an hour or two of pure Indian enjoyment.

Wilfred nestled by his side, thinking of Jacob on
his stony pillow.  The rainbow flashes from the frozen
fall gleamed before him like stairs of light, by which
God's messengers could come and go.  It is at such
moments, when we lie powerless in the grasp of a
crushing danger, and sudden help appears in
undreamed-of ways, that we know a mightier power
than man's is caring for us.

He thought of his father and mother—the love he
had missed and mourned; and love was springing up
for him again in stranger hearts, born of the pity for
his great trouble.

There was a patter on the snow.  It was not the
step of a man.  With a soft and stealthy movement
Maxica grasped his bow, and was drawing the arrow
from his quiver, when Yula bounded into Wilfred's
arms.  There was a piteous whine from the midst of
the poplars, where Kusky stood shivering, afraid to
follow.  To scramble up by the light of the fire and
bring him down was the work of a moment.

Yula's collar was still round his neck, with the
torn thong dangling from it; but Kusky had slipped
his head out of his, only leaving a little of his abundant
hair behind him.

Three hours' rest sufficed for Maxica.  He rose and
shook himself.

"That other place," he said, "where's that?"

Now his dogs were with him, Wilfred was loath
to leave their icy retreat and face the cruel world.

The fireshine and the ice, with all their mysterious
beauty, held him spell-bound.

"Maxica," he whispered, not understanding the
Cree's last question, "they call this the new world;
but don't you think it really is the very old, old
world, just as God made it?  No one has touched it
in all these ages."

Yes, it was a favourite nook of Maxica's, beautiful,
he thought, as the happy hunting-grounds beyond the
sunset—the Indian's heaven.  Could he exchange the
free range of his native wilds, with all their majestic
beauty, for a settler's hut? the trap and the bow
for the plough and the spade, and tie himself down
to one small corner?  The earth was free to all.
Wilfred had but to take his share, and roam its plains
and forests, as the red man roamed.

But Wilfred knew better than to think he could
really live their savage life, with its dark alternations
of hunger and cold.

"Could I get back to Hungry Hall in time to travel
with Mr. De Brunier?" he asked his swarthy friend.

"Yes; that other place," repeated Maxica, "where
is that?"

Wilfred could hardly tell him, he remembered so
little of the road.

"Which way did the wind blow and the snow drift
past as you stood at the friendly gates?" asked
Maxica.  "On which cheek did the wind cut keenest
when you rode into the hunters' camp at nightfall?"

Wilfred tried to recollect.

"A two days' journey," reflected Maxica, "with the
storm-wind in our faces."

He felt the edge of his hatchet, climbed the steep
ascent, and struck a gash in the stem of the nearest
poplar.  His quick sense of touch told him at which
edge of the cut the bark grew thickest.  That was
the north.  He found it with the unerring precision
of the mariner's compass.  Although he had no names
for the cardinal points, he knew them all.

There was an hour or two yet before daylight.
Wilfred found himself a stick, as they passed between
the poplars, to help himself along, and caught up
Kusky under his other arm; for the poor little fellow
was stiff in every limb, and his feet were pricked and
bleeding, from the icicles which he had suffered to
gather between his toes, not yet knowing any better.
But he was too big a dog for Wilfred to carry long.
Wilfred carefully broke out the crimsoned spikes as
soon as there was light enough to show him what was
the matter, and Yula came and washed Kusky's feet
more than once; so they helped him on.

Before the gray of the winter's dawn La Mission
was miles behind them, and breakfast a growing
necessity.

Maxica had struck out a new route for himself.
He would not follow the track Batiste and his
companions had taken.  The black pegs might yet pursue
the white and trample it down in the snow if they
were not wary.  Sooner or later an Indian
accomplishes his purpose.  He attributed the same fierce
determination to Bowkett.  Wilfred lagged more and
more.  Food must be had.  Maxica left him to
contrive a trap in the run of the game through the
bushes to their right.  So Wilfred took the dogs
slowly on.  Sitting down in the snow, without first
clearing a hole or lighting a fire, was dangerous.

Yula, sharing in the general desire for breakfast,
started off on a little hunting expedition of his own.
Kusky was limping painfully after him, as he darted
between the tall, dark pines which began to chequer
the landscape and warn the travellers they were
nearing the river.

Wilfred went after his dog to recall him.  The sun
was glinting through the trees, and the all-pervading
stillness was broken by the sound of a hatchet.  Had
Maxica crossed over unawares?  Had Wilfred turned
back without knowing it?  He drew to the spot.
There was Diomé chopping firewood, which Pe-na-Koam
was dragging across the snow towards a roughly-built
log-hut.

She dropped the boughs on the snow, and drawing
her blanket round her, came to meet him.

Diomé, not perceiving Wilfred's approach, had
retreated further among the trees, intent upon his
occupation.

Wilfred's first sensation of joy at the sight of
Pe-na-Koam turned to something like fear as he saw
her companion, for he had known him only as
Bowkett's man.  But retreat was impossible.  The
old squaw had shuffled up to him and grasped his
arm.  The sight of Yula bounding over the snow had
made her the first to perceive him.  She was pouring
forth her delight in her Indian tongue, and explaining
her appearance in such altered surroundings.  Wilfred
could not understand a word, but Maxica was not far
behind.  Kusky and Yula were already in the hut,
barking for the wa-wa (the goose) that was roasting
before the fire.

When Maxica came up, walking beside Diomé,
Wilfred knew escape was out of the question.  He
must try to make a friend—at least he must meet
him as a friend, even if he proved himself to be an
enemy.  But the work was done already.

"Ah, it is you!" cried Diomé.  "I was sure it was.
You had dropped a button in the tumble-down hut,
and the print of your boot, an English boot, was all
over the snow when I got there.  You look dazed,
my little man; don't you understand what I'm talking
about?  That old squaw is my grandmother.  You
don't know, of course, who it was sent the Blackfoot
Sapoo to dig her out of the snow; but I happen to
know.  The old man is going from Hungry Hall, and
Louison is to be promoted.  I'm on the look-out to
take his place with the new-comer; so when I met
with him, a snow-bird whispered in my ear a thing or
two.  But where are your guides?"

Wilfred turned for a word with Maxica before he
dared reply.

Both felt the only thing before them was to win
Diomé to Wilfred's side.

"Have you parted company with Bowkett?" asked
Maxica cautiously.

"Bowkett," answered Diomé, "is going to marry
and turn farmer, and I to try my luck as voyageur
to the Company.  This is the hunters' idle month, and
I am waiting here until my services are wanted at
the fort.—What cheer?" he shouted to his bright-eyed
little wife, driving the dogs from the door of the hut.

The wa-wa shortly disappeared before Maxica's
knife, for an Indian likes about ten pounds of meat
for a single meal.  Wilfred was asleep beside the fire
long before it was over; when they tried to rouse
him his senses were roaming.  The excitement and
exertion, following the blow on his head, had taken
effect at last.

Pe-na-Koam, with all an Indian woman's skill in
the use of medicinal herbs, and the experience of a
long life spent among her warrior tribe, knew well
how to take care of him.

"Leave him to me," she said to Maxica, "and go
your ways."

Diomé too was anxious for the Cree to depart.
He was looking forward to taking Wilfred back to
Acland's Hut himself.  Caleb Acland's gratitude would
express itself in a tangible form, and he did not intend
to divide it with Maxica.  His evident desire to get
rid of the Cree put the red man on his guard.  Long
did he sit beside the hunter's fire in brooding silence,
trusting that Wilfred might rise up from his
lengthened sleep ready to travel, as an Indian might have
done.  But his hope was abortive.  He drew out of
Pe-na-Koam all he wanted to know.  Diomé had been
long in Bowkett's employ.  When the Cree heard this
he shut his lips.

"Watch over the boy," he said to Pe-na-Koam, "for
danger threatens him."

Then Maxica went out and set his traps in the
fir-brake and the marsh, keeping stealthy watch round
the hut for fear Bowkett should appear, and often
looking in to note Wilfred's progress.

One day the casual mention of Bowkett's name
threw the poor boy into such a state of agitation,
Diomé suspected there had been some passage between
the two he was ignorant of.  A question now and
then, before Wilfred was himself again, convinced him
the boy had been to La Mission, and that Bowkett
had refused to recognize him.  When he spoke of it
to Pe-na-Koam, she thought of the danger at which
Maxica had hinted.  She watched for the Cree.
Diomé began to fear Wilfred's reappearance might
involve him in a quarrel with Bowkett.

As Wilfred got better, and found Hungry Hall was
shut up, he resolved to go back to Acland's Hut, if
possible, whilst his Aunt Miriam and Bowkett were
safe out of the way on their road to the church where
they were to be married.  Diomé said they would be
gone two days.  He proposed to take Wilfred with
him, when he went to the wedding, on the return of
the bride and bridegroom.

"Lend me your snow-shoes," entreated Wilfred,
"and with Maxica for a guide, I can manage the
journey alone.  Don't go with me, Diomé, for Bowkett
will never forgive the man who takes me back.  You
have been good and kind to me, why should I bring
you into trouble?"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`JUST IN TIME`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIII.


.. class:: center large bold

   *JUST IN TIME.*

.. vspace:: 2

The walk from Diomé's log hut to Uncle Caleb's
farm was a long one, but the clear, bright
sunshine of December had succeeded the pitiless sleet
and blinding snow.  Lake and river had hardened
in the icy breath of the north wind.  An iron frost
held universal sway, as Wilfred and Maxica drew near
to Acland's Hut.

.. _`The walk to Uncle Caleb's farm was a long one.`:

.. figure:: images/img-164.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: The walk to Uncle Caleb's farm was a long one.

   The walk to Uncle Caleb's farm was a long one.

The tinkle of a distant sledge-bell arrested Maxica.
Had some miscount in the day brought them face
to face with the bridal party?

They turned away from the well-known gate,
crept behind the farm buildings, and crossed the
reedy pool to Forgill's hut.

With the frozen snow full three feet deep beneath
their feet there was roadway everywhere.  Railings
scarcely showed above it, and walls could be easily
cleared with one long step.  The door of the hut was
fastened, but Wilfred waited behind it while Maxica
stole round to reconnoitre.

He returned quickly.  It was not the bridal party,
for there was not a single squaw among them.  They
were travellers in a horse-sledge, stopping at the
farm to rest.  He urged Wilfred to seize the chance
and enter with them.  The presence of the strangers
would be a protection.  They took their way through
the orchard trees, and came out boldly on the
well-worn tracks before the gate.  It excited no surprise
in the occupants of the sledge to see two dusky
figures in their long, pointed snow-shoes gliding
swiftly after them; travellers like themselves, no
doubt, hoping to find hospitality at the farm.

Yula and Kusky went bounding over the intervening space.

There were two travellers and a sledge-driver.
The dogs considered them, and did not bark.  Then
Kusky, in frantic delight, endeavoured to leap into
the sledge.  It drew up.  The driver thundered on
the gate.

"What cheer?" shouted a voice from the sledge.

It was the usual traveller's inquiry, but it thrilled
through Wilfred's ears, for it was—it could not
be—yet it was the voice of Mr. De Brunier.

Kusky was already on Gaspé's knee devouring him
with his doggie caresses.

"Is it a dream, or is it real?" asked Wilfred, as
with one long slide he overtook the sledge, and
grasped a hand of each.

"I didn't know you, coming after us in your
seven-league boots," laughed Gaspé, pointing to the long,
oval frame of Wilfred's snow-shoes, reaching a foot
or more before and behind his boot.

But Wilfred did not answer, he was whispering
rapidly to Mr. De Brunier.

"Wilfred, *mon ami*," (my friend), pursued Gaspé,
bent upon interrupting the low-voiced confidence, "it
was for your sake grandfather decided to make his
first inquiries for a farm in this neighbourhood.
Batiste was so ambiguous and so loath to speak
of your journey when he came after Louison's post,
we grew uneasy about you.  All the more glad to
find you safe at home."

"At home, but not in home," answered Wilfred,
significantly laying his finger on his lips, to prevent
any exclamation from his bewildered friend.

"All right," said Mr. De Brunier.  "We will enter
together."

Pête, who was already opening the gate, bade them
heartily welcome.  Hospitality in the lone North-West
becomes a duty.

Wilfred dropped behind the sledge, slouched his fur
cap well over his eyes, and let Maxica fold his blanket
round him, Indian fashion.

Pête led the way into the kitchen, Wilfred followed
behind the sledge-driver, and the Cree was the last to
enter.  A long row of joints were roasting before the
ample fire, giving undoubted indications of an
approaching feast.

"Just in time," observed Mr. De Brunier with a
smile, which gained a peculiar significance as it rested
on Wilfred.

"Ay, and that you are," returned old Pête; "for
the missis is gone to be married, and I was on the
look-out for her return when I heard the jingling of
your sledge-bells.  The house will be full enough by
nightfall, I reckon."

Wilfred undid the strap of his snow-shoes, gave
them to Maxica, and walked softly to the door of his
uncle's room.

He opened it with a noiseless hand, and closed it
behind him.

Mr. De Brunier's retort about the welcome which
awaited uninvited guests on a bridal night kept
Pête from noticing his movements.

The logs crackled and the sparks flew on the
kitchen hearth.  The fat from the savoury roast fell
hissing in the pan, and the hungry travellers around
it seemed to have eyes for nothing else.

Wilfred crept to his uncle's bed.  He was asleep.
The boy glanced round.  He threw off his wraps.
His first care was to find his uncle's comb and brush.
It was a luxury unknown since his departure from
Hungry Hall.  He was giving a good tug at his
tangled locks, hoping to make himself look a little
more like the schoolboy who had once before roused
the old man from his sleep, when a cough and an
exclamation sounding like, "Who is there?" told him
his uncle was awake.

"O uncle, you surely have not forgotten me—me,
your nephew, Wilfred!  Got home at last.  The
pony threw me, and I was utterly lost.  An Indian
guided me here," he answered, tumbling his words
one upon another as fast as he could, for his heart
was beating wildly.

Caleb Acland raised himself on one elbow and
grasped Wilfred by the wrist.  "It is he!  It is
flesh and blood!" he ejaculated.  "The boy himself
Pête!  Pête!"  He felt for the stick left leaning
against his bed, and stamped it on the floor.

A great sob burst unawares from the poor boy's lips.

"Don't!" said the old man in alarm.  "What are
you crying for, lad?  What's happened?  I don't
understand.  Give me your hand!  That's cold
enough—death cold.  Pête!  Pête! what are ye about?
Have you grown deaf that you can't hear me?"

He pulled Wilfred's cold fingers under the blankets
and tried to chafe them between his swollen hands.

"I'm not crying," protested Wilfred, brushing his
other hand across his eyes.  "It is the ice melting
out of me.  I'm thawing all over.  It is because I
have got back uncle, and you are glad to have me.
I should have been dead but for the Cree who
brought me home.  I was almost starving at times.
I have wandered in the snow all night."

"God bless the boy!" ejaculated the old man,
thundering on the floor once more.

"Here, Pête!  Pête!  Something quick to eat."

Pête's head appeared at the door at last.

"Whatever do you want now, master?" he demanded
in an injured tone.  "I thought I had put
everything ready for you, as handy as could be; and
you said you wouldn't call me off, with the bride
expected every minute, and the supper to cook, as
you know."

"Cook away then," returned his master impatiently.
"It is the hour for the fatted calf.  Oh, you've no
eyes, none!  Whom have I got here?  Who is this?"

Pête backed to the door in wide-eyed wonder.
"I'm struck of a heap!" he gasped, staring at
Wilfred as if he thought he would melt away into
vacancy.

"Where were you that you did not see him come
in?" asked his master sharply.

"Where?" repeated Pête indignantly.  "At your
own gate, answering a party of travellers—men
who've come down to buy land; and," he added,
changing his tone, "there is a gentleman among
them says he must speak to you, master, your own
self particular, this very night."

"It is Mr. De Brunier, uncle.  He took me in, and
sent me to the hunters' camp, where Mr. Bowkett
was to be found," interposed Wilfred.

This name was spoken with an effort.  Like many
a noble-minded boy, Wilfred hated to tell of another.
He hesitated, then went on abruptly: "I thought he
would be sure to bring me home.  Well, I got there.
He did not seem to know me.  He was all for
fiddling and dancing.  They were a rough set, uncle,
a very rough set.  Father would not have liked to
have seen me with such men.  I got away again as
quickly as I could.  The Cree who had saved me
before guided me home at last."

"What is that?  Did you say Bowkett, Hugh
Bowkett?" repeated the old man.  "Why, your aunt
was married to him this morning."

When Pête disappeared into his master's room,
Maxica, who had seated himself on the kitchen floor,
rose suddenly, and leaning over Mr. De Brunier,
asked, "Who in this place is friend to the boy
without a father?"

"I can answer your question for myself, but no
further, for I am a stranger here," replied
Mr. De Brunier.

"We are four," said Maxica, counting on his fingers.
"I hear the voice of the man at the gate—the man
who spoke against the white boy with a forked
tongue; the man who drove him out into the frosty
night, that it might kill him.  We have brought the
marten to the trap.  If it closes on him, Maxica stays
to break it."

"Come outside, where we can talk freely," answered
Mr. De Brunier, leading the way.

Gaspé and the sledge-driver were left to the enjoyment
of the roaring fire.  They were considering the
state of Kusky's feet.  Gaspé was removing the icicles
from his toes, and the man of the sledge was warmly
recommending boots, and describing the way to
make them, when the shouts at the gate told them
the bridal party had arrived.  The stupid Pête, as
they began to think, had vanished, for no one
answered the summons.  Gaspé guessed the reason,
and sent the man to open the gate.  He silenced the
dogs, and drew back into the corner, with instinctive
good breeding, to make himself as little in the way as
possible.

The great farm-house kitchen was entrance-hall
as well.  Every door opened into it.  On one hand
was the dining-room, reserved chiefly for state
occasions; on the other, the storeroom.  The family
sleeping rooms were at the back.  Like a provident
housewife, Aunt Miriam had set the tables for her
marriage feast, and filled the storeroom with good
things, before she went to church.  Pête, with a
Frenchman's genius for the spit, could manage the rest.

The arrival of one or two other guests at the same
moment detained the bridal party with their noisy
greetings.

When Aunt Miriam entered the kitchen, leaning on
her bridegroom's arm, Gaspé was almost asleep in his
dim corner.

Out ran Pête, effervescing with congratulations,
and crossing the heartiness of the bridal welcome
with the startling exclamation, "The boy,
Mrs. Bowkett!—the boy's come home!"

The bridegroom looked sharply round.  "The boy,"
he repeated, seeing Gaspé by the fire.  "There he is."

Up sprang Gaspé, bowing to the bride with all the
courtly grace of the chivalrous De Bruniers of
Breton days.

Aunt Miriam turned her head away.  "O Pête!"
she groaned, "I thought—I thought you meant—"

Bowkett did not let her finish her sentence, he
hurried her into the dining-room.  Behind him came
his bright-eyed sister, who had played the part of
bridesmaid, and was eager for the dancing and the
fun, so soon to commence.  At her side walked
Forgill in his Sunday best, all important with the
responsibility of his position, acting as proxy for his
old master.  He had given the bride away, and was
at that moment cogitating over some half-dozen
sentences destined for the after-dinner speech which
he knew would be required of him.  They were
restive, and would not follow each other.  "Happy
day" and "Best wishes" wanted setting up on stilts,
with a few long words to back them, for such an
occasion.  He knew the Indian love of speechifying
would be too strong in their hunter guests to let him
off.  He had got as far as, "Uncommonly happy day
for us all."  But "uncommonly" sounded far too
common in his critical ears.  He was searching for a
finer-sounding word, and thought he had got it in
"preternaturally," when he heard the feeble voice of
his master calling out, "Miriam!  Here, Miriam."

"Are they all deaf?" said Caleb Acland to Wilfred.
"Open the door, my lad, and show yourself to
your aunt."

Slowly and reluctantly Wilfred obeyed him.  He
held it open just a hand-breadth, and met the
scowling brow of the owner of the forked tongue.

There was mutual recognition in the glance
exchanged.

Wilfred shut the door softly, and drew the bolt
without attracting his uncle's attention.

"The place is full of strangers," he said; "I shall
see auntie soon.  I'd rather wait here with you.  I
shall be sure to see her before she goes to her new
home."

"As you like, my boy;—that Pête's a cow.  There
is no going away to a new home.  It is bringing in
a new master here before the old one is gone, so that
your aunt should not be left unprotected a single day."

As Caleb Acland spoke, Wilfred felt himself growing
hard and desperate in the cold clutch of a giant
despair.  The star of hope dropped from his sky.
He saw himself in the hand of the man who had
turned him from his door into the killing frost.

It was too late to speak out; Bowkett would be
sure to deny it, and hate him the more.  No, not a
word to Uncle Caleb until he had taken counsel with
Mr. De Brunier.  But in his hasty glance into the outer
world Mr. De Brunier was nowhere to be seen.

Wilfred was sure he would not go away without
seeing him again.  There was nothing for it but to
gain a little time, wait with his uncle until the
wedding guests were shut in the dining-room, and
then go out and find Mr. De Brunier, unless Aunt
Miriam had invited him to sit down with them.  Yes,
she was sure to do that, and Gaspé would be with
his grandfather.  But Maxica was there.  He had
saved him twice.  He knew what Maxica would say:
"To the free wild forest, and learn the use of the
trap and the bow with me."

Wilfred was sorely tempted to run away.  The
recollection of Mr. De Brunier's old-world stories
restrained him.  He thought of the Breton emigrants.
"What did they do in their despair?  What all men
can do, their duty."  He kept on saying these words
over and over, asking himself, "What is my duty?
Have I no duty to the helpless old man who has
welcomed me so kindly?  How will Bowkett behave
to him?"  Wilfred felt much stronger to battle
through with the hunter on his uncle's behalf, than
when he thought only of himself.  "The brave and
loyal die at their posts.  Gaspé would, rather than
run away—rather than do anything that looked like
running away."

"What is the matter with you, Wilfred?" asked
his uncle anxiously.  "What makes you stand like
that, my boy?"

"I am so tired," answered Wilfred, "I have
walked all day to-day, and all day yesterday.  If I
take the cushion out of your chair for a pillow, I
might lie down before the stove, uncle."

"That Pête is an ass not to bring something to eat,
as if he could not make those fellows in the
dining-room wait half-a-minute.  But stop, there is some
broth keeping hot on the stove.  Take that, and come
and lie down on the bed by me; then I can see you
and feel you, and know I have got you again,"
answered Uncle Caleb, as if he had some
presentiment of what was passing in Wilfred's mind.

Glad enough to obey, Wilfred drank the broth
eagerly, and came to the bed.  The old man took him
by both hands and gazed in his face, murmuring,
"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

The peace that Uncle Caleb rejoiced in was his
own alone; all around him strife was brewing.  But
his peace was of that kind which circumstances
cannot give or take away.

"Kneel down beside me just one minute, my boy,"
he went on.  "We must not be like the nine lepers,
who forgot the thanks when the good had come.
They wouldn't even with the tailors, for in the whole
nine put together there was not one bit of a true
man, or they could not have done it."

Wilfred fell on his knees and repeated softly the
Christ-taught prayer of the ages, "Our Father who
art in heaven."  He remembered how he had been
fed from the wild bird's *cache*, and saved by the wild
man's pity, and his heart was swelling.  But when
he came to "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive
them that trespass against us," he stopped abruptly.

"Go on," whispered the old man softly.

"I can't," muttered Wilfred.  "It isn't in my heart;
I daren't go on.  It is speaking with a forked tongue:
words one way, thoughts another; telling lies to God."

Caleb Acland looked at him as if he were slowly
grasping the position.

"Is it Bowkett that you can't forgive?" he asked
gently.  "Did you think he need not have lost you?
Did you think he would not know you, my poor boy?"

"Have I got to live with him always?" returned
Wilfred.

"No, not if you don't like him.  I'll send you back
to school," answered his uncle in a tone of decision.

"Do you mean it, uncle?  Do you really say that
I shall go back to school?" exclaimed the boy, his
heavy heart's lead beginning to melt, as the way of
escape opened so unexpectedly before him.

"It is a promise," repeated the old man soothingly.
It was obvious now there was something wrong,
which the boy refused to explain.

"Patience a bit," he thought; "I can't distress him.
It will leak out soon; but it is growing strange that
nobody comes near us."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`WEDDING GUESTS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIV


.. class:: center large bold

   *WEDDING GUESTS.*

.. vspace:: 2

More guests were arriving—Diomé, Batiste,
Mathurin, and a dozen others.  Bowkett
came out into the porch to receive them, and usher
one after the other into the dining-room.  As the last
went in before him, his friend Dick Vanner of the
forked tongue tapped him on the shoulder.

"Who is in there?" he whispered.  "Did you
see?" pointing as he spoke to the door of Uncle
Caleb's room.

Gaspé was on the alert in a moment, longing to
break a lance in his friend's behalf.  The men
dropped their voices, but the echo of one sentence
reached him.  It sounded like, "No, she only saw the
other boy."

"So, Wilfred, *mon cher*, you and I have changed
places, and I have become that 'other boy,'" laughed
Gaspé to himself, lying perdu with an open ear.

As the two separated they muttered, "Outwit us?
Like to see it done!"

"Keep that door shut, and leave the rest to me,"
added Vanner, sauntering up to the fire.—"Accommodation
is scanty here to-night.  How many are there
in your party?" he asked, looking down on Gaspé.
"Pête said four—three men and a boy.  Was not it
five—three men and two boys?"

"Yes, five," answered Gaspé.

"You boys must want something to eat," remarked
Vanner, carelessly pushing open the door of the
storeroom, and returning with a partridge pie.  "Here,
fall to.  Where's your chum?"

Gaspé saw the trap into which he was expected to
walk.  He stepped over it.

"Have not you been taught to look out for number
one?" asked Gaspé.  "I'll have a turn at that pie by
myself, now I have got the chance, before I call on a
chum to help me.  I can tell you that."

"Confound you, you greedy young beggar!" exclaimed
Vanner.

"Try thirty miles in an open sled, with twenty-five
degrees of frost on the ground, and see if you
would be willing to divide your pie at the end of it,"
retorted Gaspé.

"That is a cool way of asking for one apiece,"
remarked Vanner, abstracting a second pie from the
storeroom shelves.

"If you've another to spare I'd like two for
myself," persisted Gaspé.

"Then have it," said Vanner.  "I am bound to
give you a satisfaction.  We do not reckon on a
wedding feast every night.  Now, where is the other
boy?  You can't object to call him.  Here is a
sausage as long as your arm.  Walk into that."

"You will not get me to move with this dish
before me," returned the undaunted Gaspé, and Vanner
felt it waste of time to urge him further.  He went
back to his friends.

Gaspé was at Caleb Acland's door in a moment,
singing through the keyhole,—

   |  "St. George he is for England, St. Denis is for France.
   |  *Honi soit qui mal y pense.*"
   |

Wilfred rose to open the door as he recognized his
friend's voice.

"Keep where you are.  Don't come out for anybody,"
urged Gaspé, retreating as he heard a noise:
but it was only his grandfather re-entering the porch.

He flew to his side.  "What's up?" he asked
breathlessly.

"A goodly crop of suspicions, if all the Cree tells
me is true.  Your poor friend is fitted with an uncle
in this Bowkett after their old ballad type of the
Babes in the Wood."

"Now listen to me, grandfather, and I can tell
you a little bit more," answered Gaspé, giving his
narrative with infinite delight at the success of his
manoeuvring.

The moon shone clear and bright.  The tree in the
centre of the court, laden with hoar-frost, glittered
in its crystal white like some bridal bouquet of
gigantic size.  The house was ablaze with light from
every window.  The hunters had turned their horses
adrift.  They were galloping at will among the
orchard trees to keep themselves warm.  Maxica was
wandering in their midst, counting their numbers to
ascertain the size of the party.  Mr. De Brunier
crossed over to him, to discuss Gaspé's intelligence,
and sent his grandson back indoors, where the
sledge-driver was ready to assist him in the demolition of
the pies which had so signally failed to lure Wilfred
from his retreat.

Mr. De Brunier followed his grandson quickly, and
walking straight to Uncle Caleb's door, knocked for
admittance.

The cowkeeper, the only individual at Acland's Hut
who did not know Wilfred personally, was sent by
Bowkett to keep up the kitchen fire.

The man stared.  "The master has got his door
fastened," he said; "I can't make it out."

"Is Mr. Acland ready to see me?" asked Mr. De
Brunier, repeating his summons.

"Yes," answered Uncle Caleb; "come in."

Wilfred opened the door.

Uncle Caleb raised himself on his elbow, and catching
sight of the dishes on the kitchen-table, said, "It
seems to me the old man's orders are to go for little.
But whilst the life is in me I am master in this place.
Be so good, sir, as to tell that fellow of mine to bring
that pie in here, and give this child something to eat."

"With pleasure," returned his visitor.

Wilfred's supper provided for, the two looked well
at each other.

"What sort are you?" was the question in both
minds.  They trusted, as we all do more or less, to
the expression.  A good honest character writes itself
on the face.  They shook hands.

"I have to thank you for bringing back my boy,"
said Uncle Caleb.

"Not me," returned Mr. De Brunier, briefly
recapitulating the circumstances which led to Wilfred's
sojourn at Hungry Hall, and why he sent him to the
hunters' camp.  "Since then," he added, "your
nephew has been wandering among the Indians.  It
was a Cree who guided him home—the same Cree
who warned him not to trust himself with Bowkett."

"Come here, Wilfred, and tell me exactly what this
Indian said," interposed Caleb Acland, a grave look
gathering on his wrinkled brow.

"Not one word, uncle.  Maxica did not speak,"
answered Wilfred.  "He brought me three queer bits
of wood from the hearth and stuck them in the floor
before me, so, and so," continued the boy, trying to
explain the way in which the warning had been given
to him.

Uncle Caleb was getting so much exhausted with
the excitement of Wilfred's return, and the effort of
talking to a stranger, he did not quite understand all
Wilfred was saying.

"We can't condemn a fellow on evidence like that,"
moaned the old man, "and one so near to me as
Bowkett.  What does it mean for Miriam?"

"Will you see this Cree and hear for yourself?"
asked Mr. De Brunier.  "We are neither judge nor
jury.  We are not here to acquit or condemn, but a
warning like this is not to be despised.  I came to
put you on your guard."

The feeble hand grasped his, "I am about spent,"
groaned Caleb.  "It is my breath.  Let me rest a bit.
I'll think this over.  Come again."

The gasping words came with such painful effort,
Mr. De Brunier could only lay him back amongst his
pillows and promise to return in the morning, or
earlier if it were wished.  He was at the door,
when Caleb Acland signed to him to return.

"Not a word to my sister yet.  The boy is safe
here.  Tell him he is not to go out of this room."

Mr. De Brunier shook the feeble hand once more,
and gave the required promise.  There was one more
word.  "What was that about buying land?  I might
help you there; a little business between us, you
understand."

"Yes, yes," answered Mr. De Brunier, feeling as if
such another effort might shake the labouring breath
out of the enfeebled frame in a moment.

"Keep in here.  Keep quiet; and remember,
whatever happens, I shall be near," was Mr. De Brunier's
parting charge to Wilfred as he went back into the
kitchen, intending to watch there through the night,
if no one objected to his presence.

The old man started as the door closed after him.
"Don't fasten it, lad!" he exclaimed.  "It looks too
much like being afraid of them."

Mr. De Brunier joined Gaspé and the sledge-driver
at their supper.  Gaspé watched him attentively as
they ate on in silence.

Bowkett came out and spoke to them.  "I am
sorry," he said, "to seem inhospitable, but the house
is so full to-night I really cannot offer you any further
accommodation.  But the men have a sleeping hut
round the corner, under the pines, where you can pass
the night.  I'll send one of them with you to show
you the way and light a fire."

No exception could be taken to this.  The three
finished their supper and were soon ready to depart.

"I must see Mr. Acland again about the land
business," remarked Mr. De Brunier, recalling Uncle
Caleb's hint.

Bowkett summoned his man, and Diomé came out
with him.  He strolled through the porch and looked
about him, as if he were considering the weather.

Maxica was still prowling behind the orchard trees,
like a hungry coyote watching for the remnants of
the feast, as it seemed.  The two met.

"There will be mischief before these fellows part,"
said Diomé.  "Keep a sharp look-out for the boy."

Diomé went on to catch Dick Vanner's pony.
Maxica stole up to the house.  The travellers were
just coming out.  He gave Yula a call.  Gaspé was
the only one who perceived him, as Yula bounded
between them.

It was hard for Gaspé to go away and leave his
friend without another word.  He had half a mind
to take Kusky with him.  He lingered irresolute a
moment or two behind his grandfather.  Bowkett
had opened the door of Caleb Acland's room, and he
saw Kusky creeping in between Bowkett's legs.

"How is this?" the latter was saying in a noisy
voice.  "Wilfred got home, and won't show his
face!—won't come out amongst us to have his dinner and
speak to his aunt!  What is the meaning of it?
What makes him afraid of being seen?"

There was not a word from Wilfred.  It was the
feeble voice of his Uncle Caleb that was speaking:—

"Yes, it is Wilfred come back.  I've got him here
beside me all safe.  He has been wandering about
among the redskins, half dead and nearly starved.
Don't disturb us.  I am getting him to sleep.  Tell
Miriam she must come here and look at him.  You can
all come and look at him; Forgill and your Diomé too.
They all know my boy.  How has Miriam managed to
keep away?"

"As if we could spare the bride from the marriage
feast," laughed Bowkett, raising his voice that every
one might hear what they were saying.

"Neither can I spare my boy out of my sight a
single moment," said the old man quietly.

"That's capital," laughed Gaspé to himself, as he
ran after his grandfather.

They did not encounter Maxica, but they passed
Diomé trying to catch the horse, and gave him a little
help by the way.

"You are not going?" he asked anxiously.  "I
thought you would be sure to stay the night.  You are
a friend of Wilfred Acland's, are you not, Mr. De
Brunier?  He was so disappointed when he found
Hungry Hall was shut up.  I thought you would
know him; so do I.  Mrs. Bowkett says the boy is
not her nephew."

"I rather think that has been said for her," remarked
Mr. De Brunier quietly.

"I see through it," exclaimed Gaspé; "I see what
they are driving at.  Her husband told her I was the
boy.  She came and looked at me.  Bowkett knows
well enough the real Wilfred is in his uncle's room,
If they could get him out into the kitchen, they would
make a great clamour and declare he is an impostor
trying to take the old man in."

"You've hit it," muttered Diomé.  "But they shan't
give him lynch law.  I'll not stand by and see that."

"Come back, grandfather," cried Gaspé.  "Give me
one of your English sovereigns with a little silver
threepenny on either side to kiss it.  I'll string them
on my watch-chain for a lady's locket, walk in with
it for a wedding present, and undeceive the bride
before them all."

"Not so fast, Gaspard.  We should only bring the
crisis before we have raised our safeguards," rejoined
Mr. De Brunier thoughtfully.  "I saw many a gun
set down against the wall, as the hunters came in."

"That is nothing," put in Diomé; "we are never
without them."

"That is everything," persisted Mr. De Brunier.
"Men with arms habitually in their hands use them
with small provocation, and things are done which
would never be done by deliberate purpose."

"I am not Dick Vanner's groom," said Diomé, "but
he wants me to hold his horse in the shadow of those
pines or under the orchard wall; and I'll hold it as
long as he likes, and walk it about half the night in
readiness for him, and then I shall know where he is
bound for."

"The American frontier, with Wilfred behind him,
unless I am making a great mistake.  If Bowkett laid
a finger on him here, half his guests would turn upon
him," observed Mr. De Brunier.

"That's about it," returned Diomé.  "Now I am
going to shut up this horse in one of the sheds, ready
for Vanner at a moment's notice, and then I'll try for
a word with Forgill.  He is working so hard with the
carving-knife there is no getting at him."

"There is one of the Aclands' men lighting a fire in
his hut, ready for us," put in Gaspé.

Diomé shook his head.  "He!" he repeated in accents
of contempt; "he would let it all out at the
wrong time."

"Is the Cree gone?"

"Maxica is on the scent already,' replied Diomé,
whistling carelessly as they parted.

"Gaspard," said Mr. De Brunier, as they entered the
hut, "do you remember passing a policeman on the
road.  He was watching for a Yankee spirit cart,
contraband of course.  He will have caught it by this
time, and emptied the barrels, according to our new
Canadian law.  Go back in the sledge—you will meet
him returning—and bring him here.  If he rides into
the farm-court before daybreak, your little friend is
safe.  As for me, I must keep watch here.  No one
can leave the house without me seeing him, the night
is so clear.  A dark figure against the white ground
is visible at twice this distance; and Maxica is
somewhere by the back of the homestead.  Neither sight
nor sound will escape an Indian."

Mr. De Brunier despatched the sledge-driver back
to the farm with the man Bowkett had sent to light
their fire, to try to procure a fresh horse.  This was
easily managed.  Bowkett was delighted to think the
travellers were about to resume their journey, and
declared the better half of hospitality was to speed the
parting guest.

The sledge went round to Forgill's hut.  Gaspé
wrapped himself in the bearskin and departed.  No
one saw him go; no one knew that Mr. De Brunier
was left behind.  He built up the fire and reconnoitred
his ground.  In one corner of the hut was a good stout
cudgel.

"I must anticipate your owner's permission and
adopt you," he said, as he gave it a flourish to try its
weight.  Then he looked to the revolver in his breast
pocket, and began his walk, so many paces in front
of the hut, with his eye on the farm-house porch, and
so many paces walking backwards, with it still in
sight—a self-appointed sentry, ready to challenge the
enemy single-handed, for he did not count much upon
Diomé.  He saw how loath he was to come into
collision with Bowkett, and reckoned him more as a
friend in the camp than as an active ally.  There
was Maxica, ready like a faithful mastiff to fly at the
throat of the first man who dared to lay a hand on
Wilfred, regardless of consequences.  He did not know
Maxica, but he knew the working of the Indian
mind.  Revenge is the justice of the savage.  It was
Maxica's retaliation that he feared.  Diomé had spoken
of Forgill, but Mr. De Brunier knew nothing of him, so
he left him out of count.  It was clear he must chiefly
rely on his own coolness and courage.  "The moral force
will tell in such an encounter as this, and that is all
on my side," he said to himself.  "It will tell on the
outsiders and the farm-servants.  I shall find some to
second me."  He heard the scrape of the fiddle and
the merry chorus of some hunting-song, followed by
the quick beat of the dancers' footsteps.

Hour succeeded hour.  The fire in the hut burned
low.  De Brunier left his post for a moment to throw
on fresh logs.  He returned to his watch.  The
house-door opened.  Out came Diomé and crossed to the
cattle-sheds.  Mr. De Brunier saw him come back
with Vanner's horse.  He changed his position,
creeping in behind the orchard trees, until he was within
a few yards of the house.  The three feet of snow
beneath his feet gave him an elevation.  He was
looking down into the court, where the snow had been
partially cleared.

Diomé was walking the horse up and down before
the door.  It was not a night in which any one could
stand still.  His impatient stamping to warm his feet
brought out Vanner and Bowkett, with half-a-dozen
others.  The leave-taking was noisy and prolonged.
Batiste's head appeared in the doorway.

"I cannot count on his assistance," thought Mr. De
Brunier, "but I can count on his neutrality; and
Diomé must know that a word from me would bring
about his dismissal from his new master."

Vanner mounted and rode off along the slippery
ground as only a hunter could ride.

"Now for the first act," thought Mr. De Brunier.
"May my Gaspard be speeding on his errand.  The
hour draws near."

As Bowkett and his friends turned back into the
house, Diomé walked rapidly across the other end of
the orchard and went towards Forgill's hut.  With
cautious steps De Brunier followed.

Diomé was standing moodily by the fire.  He started.

"Well," demanded Mr. De Brunier, "how goes the night?"

"For God's sake keep out of the way, sir.  They
have made this hut the rendezvous, believing you had
started hours ago," exclaimed Diomé brightening.

"Did you think I had deserted the poor boy?"
asked Mr. De Brunier.

"I was thinking," answered Diomé, waiving the
question, "Dick Vanner is a dangerous fellow to thwart
when the bowie-knife is in his hand."

"Well, you will see it done, and then you may find
him not quite so dangerous as he seems," was the quiet
reply.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`TO THE RESCUE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XV.


.. class:: center large bold

   *TO THE RESCUE.*

.. vspace:: 2

Diomé had no more information to give.  "For
the love of life, sir," he entreated, as the brief
conference ended, "move off to the other side of the
house, or you will be seen by Vanner as he returns.
A hunter's eye, Mr. De Brunier, notices the least
change in the shadows.  You mean to hide among
the orchard trees, but you can't stand still.  You will
be frozen to death, and a moving shadow will betray you."

His cautionary counsels were wasted on a
preoccupied mind.  De Brunier was examining the
fastenings of the door.  There was a lock, but the
key was with the owners of the hut.  There was
also a bar which secured it on the inside.  Forgill's
basket of tools stood by the chimney.

"How much time have we?" asked Mr. De Brunier.

"A good half-hour, sir," replied Diomé.

"Time enough for me to transfer this staple to the
outside of the doorpost?"

Diomé hesitated before he answered this inquiry.
"Well then?" he asked in turn.

"Well then," repeated Mr. De Brunier, "this Vanner
is to meet you here.  Don't go out of the hut to take
his horse; beckon him to come inside.  Shut the
door, as if for caution, and tell him you have seen me
watching him from the orchard trees.  He will listen
to that.  Two minutes will be enough for me to bar
the door on the outside, and we shall have caged the
wild hawk before he has had time to pounce upon his
prey.  I must shut you in together; but play your
part well, and leave the rest to me."

"Shut me in with Dick Vanner in a rage!"
exclaimed Diomé.  "He would smell treachery in a
moment.  Not for me."

It went hard with Diomé to turn against his old
companions.  It was clear to Mr. De Brunier the
man was afraid of a hand-to-hand encounter.  With
such half-hearted help the attempt was too hazardous.
He changed his tactics.

"I am not in their secrets," protested Diomé.  "I
am only here to hold his horse.  They don't trust me."

"And I," added Mr. De Brunier, "am intent upon
preventing mischief.  I'll walk round once more.
Should you hear the house-door open, you will
probably find I have gone in."

Yes, Mr. De Brunier was beginning to regret
leaving the house; and yet, if he had not done so, he
could not have started Gaspé to intercept the
policeman.  "Now," he thought, "the boy will be carried
off before they can arrive."  His thoughts were turning
to a probable pursuit.  He crossed to the back of
the house to look for the Cree.  No one better than
an Indian for work like that.

The light from the windows of the farm-house was
reflected from the shining ground, making it bright as
day before them, and deepening the gloom of the
shadows beyond.  A low, deep growl from Yula
brought Mr. De Brunier to the opposite corner of
the house, where he discovered Maxica lying on the
ground, with his ear to the end of one of the largest
logs with which the house was built.  They recognized
each other instantly, but not a word was said.  They
were at the angle of the building where the logs
crossed each other.

Suddenly Mr. De Brunier remembered the capacity
in the uncut trunk of a tree for transmitting sound,
and following Maxica's example he too laid his ear to
the end of another log, and found himself, as it were,
in a whispering gallery.  The faintest sound at the
other end of the log was distinctly audible.  They
tried each corner of the house.  The music and the
dancing from dining-room to kitchen did not detain
them long.  At the back they could hear the regular
breathing of a healthy sleeper and the laboured,
painful respiration of the broken-down old man.

The log which crossed the one at which they were
now listening ran at the end of the storeroom, and
gave back no sound.  It was evident both Wilfred
and his uncle had fallen asleep, and were therefore off
their guard.

To drive up the loose ponies and make them gallop
round the house to waken them was a task Yula took
off their hands and accomplished so well that Bowkett,
listening in the midst of the whirling dancers, believed
that Vanner had returned.

Maxica was back at the angle of the logs, moving
his ear from one to the other.  He raised a warning
finger, and laid his ear a little closer to the storeroom
side.  Mr. De Brunier leaned over him and pressed
his own to the tier above.  Some one had entered the
storeroom.

"Anything here?" asked a low voice.

"What's that behind the door?" whispered another
in reply.

"A woman's ironing board."

"A woman's what?"

"Never mind what it is if it will slide through the
window," interposed a third impatiently, and they
were gone.

But the watchers without had heard enough to
shape their plan.  Maxica was ear, Mr. De Brunier
was eye, and so they waited for the first faint echo of
the horse-hoofs in the distance or the tinkle of the
sledge-bell.

Within the house the merriment ran high.  Bridal
healths were drank with three times three.  The
stamp of the untiring dancers drowned the galloping
of the ponies.

Aunt Miriam paused a moment, leaning on her
bridegroom's arm.  "I am dizzy with tiredness," she
said.  "I think I have danced with every one.  I
can surely slip away and speak to Caleb now.  What
made him fasten his door?"

"To keep those travellers out; and now he won't
undo it: an old man's crotchet, my dear.  I have
spoken to him.  He is all right, and his cry is, 'Don't
disturb me, I must sleep,'" answered Bowkett.  "You'll
give Batiste his turn? just one more round."

Wilfred was wakened by his Yula's bark beneath
the window.  Kusky, who was sleeping by the stove,
sprang up and answered it, and then crept stealthily
to Wilfred's feet.

"That dog will wake the master," said some one in
the kitchen.

The bedroom door was softly opened, a low whistle
and a tempting bone lured Kusky away.  Wilfred
was afraid to attempt to detain him, not venturing
to show himself to he knew not whom.  There was
a noise at the window.  He remembered it was a
double one.  It seemed to him somebody was trying
to force open the outer pane.

A cry of "Thieves! thieves!" was raised in the
kitchen.  Wilfred sprang upright.  Uncle Caleb
wakened with a groan.

"Look to the door.  Guard every window," shouted
Bowkett, rushing into the room, followed by
half-a-dozen of his friends, who had seized their guns as
they ran.

The outer window was broken.  Through the inner,
which was not so thickly frozen, Wilfred could see the
shadow of a man.  He knew that Bowkett was by the
side of the bed, but his eyes were fixed on the pane.

At the first smash of the butt end of Vanner's gun,
through shutter and frame, Mr. De Brunier laid a
finger on Maxica's arm.  The Cree, who was holding
down Yula, suddenly let him go with a growl and a
spring.  Vanner half turned his head, but Yula's
teeth were in his collar.  The thickness of the hunter's
clothing kept the grip from his throat, but he was
dragged backwards.  Maxica knelt upon him in a
moment, with a huge stone upraised, ready to dash his
brains out if he ventured to utter a cry.  Mr. De
Brunier stepped out from the shadow and stood before
the window, waiting in Vanner's stead.  For what?
He hardly dared to think.  The window was raised a
finger's breadth, and the muzzle of a hunter's gun
was pointed at his ear.  He drew a little aside and
flattened himself against the building.  The gun was
fired into the air.

"That is a feint," thought Mr. De Brunier.  "They
have not seen us yet.  When they do, the tug comes.
Two against twenty at the very least, unless we hear
the sledge-bell first.  It is a question of time.  The
clock is counting life and death for more than one of
us.  All hinges on my Gaspé.  Thank God, I know
he will do his very best.  There is no mistrust of
Gaspé; and if I fall before he comes, if I meet death
in endeavouring to rescue this fatherless boy, the God
who sees it all, in whose hand these lawless hunters
are but as grasshoppers, will never forget my Gaspé."

The report of Bowkett's gun roused old Caleb's
latent fire.

"What is it?" he demanded.  "Are the Indians
upon us?  Where is Miriam?"

Wilfred threw the bearskin across his feet over
the old man's back.

"I am here!" cried Bowkett, with an ostentatious
air of protection.  "I'll defend the place; but the
attack is at this end of the house.  First of all, I
carry you to Miriam and safety at the other."

Bowkett, in the full pride of his strength, lifted up
the feeble old man as if he were a child and carried
him out of the room.

"Wilfred, my boy, keep close to me, keep close,"
called Uncle Caleb; but a strong man's hand seized
hold of Wilfred and pulled him back.

"Who are you?" demanded Wilfred, struggling
with all his might.  "Let me go, I tell you; let
me go!"

The door was banged up behind Uncle Caleb and
Bowkett.  The room was full of men.

Wilfred knew too well the cry of "Thieves" was all
humbug—a sham to get him away from his uncle.

"Forgill!  Forgill!" he shouted.  "Pête!  Pête!
Help me! help me!"

A pillow was tossed in his face.

"Don't cram the little turkey-cock with his own
feathers," said a voice he was almost glad to recognize,
for he could not feel that Mathurin would really hurt
him.  He kicked against his captor, and getting one
hand free, he tried to grasp at this possible friend;
but the corner of the pillow, crushed into his mouth,
choked his shouts.  "So it's Mathurin's own old
babby, is it?" continued the deep, jovial voice.  "Didn't
I tell ye he was uncommon handy with his little fists?
But he is a regular mammy's darling for all that.  It
is Mathurin will put the pappoose in its cradle.  Ah! but
if it won't lie still, pat it on its little head; Batiste
can show you how."

In all this nonsense Wilfred comprehended the
threat and the caution.  His frantic struggles were
useless.  They only provoked fresh bursts of
merriment.  Oh, it was hard to know they were useless,
and feel the impotency of his rage!  He was forced
to give in.  They bound him in the sheets.

Mathurin was shouting for—

   |  "A rabbit-skin,
   |  To wrap his baby bunting in.
   |

They took the rug from the floor and wrapped
it round Wilfred.  He was laid on the ironing board.

He felt the strong, firm straps that were binding
him to it growing tighter and tighter.

What were they going to do with him? and where
was Mr. De Brunier?

The hunters set him up against the wall, like the
pappoose in the wigwam of the Blackfoot chief, whilst
they opened the window.

Mr. De Brunier stood waiting, his arms uplifted
before his face, ready to receive the burden they
were to let fall.  It was but a little bit of face
that was ever visible beneath a Canadian fur cap,
such as both the men were wearing.  Smoked
skin was the only clothing which could resist the
climate, therefore the sleeves of one man's coat were
like the sleeves of another.  The noisy group in
the bedroom, who had been drinking healths all
night, saw little but the outstretched arms, and took
no notice.

"Young lambs to sell!" shouted Mathurin, heaving
up the board.

"What if he takes to blaring?" said one of the
others.

"Let him blare as he likes when once he is
outside," retorted a third.

"Lull him off with 'Yankee-doodle,'" laughed
another.

"He'll just lie quiet like a little angel, and then
nothing will hurt him," continued the incorrigible
Mathurin, "till we come to—

   |  "'Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree-top,
   |  When the wind blows the cradle will rock;
   |  When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
   |  Then down goes cradle, and baby, and all.'"
   |

This ridiculous nursery ditty, originated by the
sight of the Indian pappooses hung so often on the
bough of a tree when their mothers are busy, read to
Wilfred his doom.

Would these men really take him out into the
darksome forest, and hang him to some giant pine,
and leave him there, as Pe-na-Koam was left, to die
alone of hunger and cold?

It was an awful moment.  The end of the board
to which he was bound was resting on the window-sill.

"Gently now," said one.

"Steady there," retorted another.

"Now it is going beautifully," cried a third.

"Ready, Vanner, ready," they exclaimed in chorus.
Caution and prudence had long since gone to the
winds with the greater part of them.  Mathurin
alone kept the control.

Mr. De Brunier nodded, and placed himself between
the window and the two men on the snow in deadly
silent wrestle, trusting that his own dark shadow
might screen them from observation yet a little longer.
He saw Wilfred's feet appear at the window.  His
hand was up to guide the board in a moment, acting
in concert with the men above.  They slid it easily
to the ground.

Mr. De Brunier's foot was on a knot in the logs of
the wall, and stretching upwards he shut the window
from the outside.  It was beyond his power to fasten
it; but a moment or two were gained.  His knife
was soon hacking at the straps which bound Wilfred
to his impromptu cradle.  They looked in each other's
faces; not a word was breathed.  Wilfred's hands
were freed.  He sat up and drew out his feet from
the thick folds of the rug.  Mr. De Brunier seized
his hand, and they ran, as men run for their lives,
straight to Forgill's hut.

Diomé saw them coming.  He was still leading
Vanner's horse.  He wheeled it round and covered
their retreat, setting it off prancing and curvetting
between them and the house.

Through the open door of Forgill's hut the fire was
glowing like a beacon across the snow.  It was the
darkest hour of all that brilliant night.  The moon
was sinking low, the stars were fading; the dawning
was at hand.

The hut was gained at last.  The door was shut
behind the fugitives, and instantly barred.  Every
atom of furniture the hut contained was piled against
it, and then they listened for the return of the sledge.
Whether daylight would increase their danger or
diminish it, Mr. De Brunier hardly knew.  But with
the dreaded daylight came the faint tinkle of a distant
bell and the jingling of a chain bridle.

The Canadian police in the Dominion of the far
North-West are an experienced troop of cavalry.
Trooper and charger are alike fitted for the difficult
task of maintaining law and order among the scattered,
lawless population sprinkling its vast plains and forest
wilds.  No bronco can outride the splendid war-horse,
and the mere sight of his scarlet-coated rider produces
an effect which we in England little imagine.  For he
is the representative of the strong and even hand of
British justice, which makes itself felt wherever it
touches, ruling all alike with firmness and mercy,
exerting a moral force to which even the Blackfoot
in his moya yields.

Mr. De Brunier pulled down his barricade almost
before it was finished, for the sledge came shooting
down the clearing with the policeman behind it.

Wilfred clasped his hands together at the joyful
sight.  "They come! they come!" he cried.

Out ran Mr. De Brunier, waving his arms in the
air to attract attention, and direct the policeman to the
back of the farm-house, where he had left Dick Vanner
writhing under Maxica's grasp on the frozen ground.

When the window was so suddenly closed from the
outside, the hunters, supposing Vanner had shut it,
let it alone for a few minutes, until wonder prompted
Mathurin to open it just a crack for a peep-hole.

At the sight of Vanner held down by his Indian
antagonist he threw it to its widest.  Gun after gun
was raised and pointed at Maxica's head; but none
of them dared to fire, for the ball would have struck
Vanner also.  Mathurin was leaping out of the window
to his assistance, when Yula relaxed his hold of
Vanner's collar, and sprang at Mathurin, seizing him
by the leg, and keeping him half in half out of the
window, so that no one else could get out over him
or release him from the inside.

There was a general rush to the porch; but the
house-door had been locked and barred by Bowkett's
orders, and the key was in his pocket.

He did it to prevent any of the Aclands' old servants
going out of the house to interfere with Vanner.  It
was equally successful in keeping in the friends who
would have gone to his help.

"The key! the key!" roared Batiste.

Another seized on old Pête and shook him because
he would not open the door.  In vain Pête protested
the key was missing.  They were getting furious.
"The key! the key!" was reiterated in an
ever-increasing crescendo.

They seized on Pête and shook him again.  They
would have the key.

Mathurin's yell for help grew more desperate.  With
one hand holding on to the window-frame, he could not
beat off the dog.  The blows he aimed at him with
the other were uncertain and feeble.

"Who let the brute out?" demanded Batiste.

He had seen Yula lying by the kitchen fire when
he first arrived, and of course knew him again.
Ah! and the dog had recognized him also, for he had
saluted him with a low, deep growl.  It had watched
its chance.  It was paying back old scores.  Batiste
knew that well.

Another howl of pain from Mathurin.

The heel of an English boot might have given such
a kick under the lock that it would have sent the
spring back with a jerk; but they were all wearing
the soft, glove-like moccasin, and knew no more
about the mechanism of a lock than a baby.  Their
life had been passed in the open; when they left the
saddle for the hut in the winter camp, their ideas of
door-fastening never rose beyond the latch and the
bar.  A dozen gun-stocks battered on the door.  It
was tough and strong, and never stirred.

Pête was searching everywhere for the key.  He
would have let them out gladly, only too thankful to
rid the house of such a noisy crew, and leave them to
fight the thieves outside; but no key was to be found.

"We always hang it on this nail," he protested,
groping about the floor.

Patience could hold out no longer.  There was a
shout for Bowkett.

"Don't leave me," Miriam had entreated, when
Bowkett brought her brother into the dining-room
and set him in the arm-chair by the fire; for she
thought the old man's life would go every moment,
and Forgill shared her fears.

"There are enough to defend the place," he said,
"without me;" and he gave all his care to his master.

"The boy!  Wilfred!" gasped Caleb Acland, making
vain attempts to return to find him.  His sister and
Forgill thought he was wandering, and trusted in
Bowkett's strong arm to hold him back.

How could Bowkett leave his bride?  He was
keeping his hands clean.  There were plenty to do
his dirty work.  He himself was to have nothing to
do with it, according to Vanner's programme.  He
would not go.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`IN CONFUSION`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVI.


.. class:: center large bold

   *IN CONFUSION.*

.. vspace:: 2

There was a thundering rap at the dining-room
window, and a voice Bowkett instantly
recognized as Diomé's rang out the warning word,—

"The police!  The police are here!"

"Thank God!" exclaimed Miriam; but her bridegroom's
cheek grew deadly pale, and he rushed into
the kitchen, key in hand.  The clamouring group
around the door divided before him, as Diomé hissed
his warning through the keyhole.

The door flew open.  Bowkett was almost knocked
down by his hurrying guests.  Each man for his
horse.  Some snatched up their guns, some left them
behind.  Broncos were caught by the mane, by the
ear, by the tail.  Their masters sprang upon their
backs.  Each man leaped upon the first horse he
could lay hold of, saddle or no saddle, bridle or no
bridle.  What did it matter so that they got away? or
else, horrors of horrors! such an escapade as they
had been caught in might get one or other among
them shut up for a month or two in Garry Jail.
They scattered in every direction, as chickens scatter
at the flutter of the white owl's wing.

Diomé put the bridle of Vanner's horse into
Bowkett's hand.  "To the frontier," he whispered.
"You know the shortest road.  We are parting
company; for I go northwards."

Bowkett looked over his shoulder to where Pête
stood staring in the doorway.  "Tell your mistress
we are starting in pursuit," he shouted, loud enough
for all to hear, as he sprang on Vanner's horse and
galloped off, following the course of the wild geese to
Yankee land.

Within ten minutes after the first jingling sound
from the light shake of the trooper's bridle the place
was cleared.

"Oh, I did it!" said Gaspé, with his arm round
Wilfred's neck.  "I was back to a minute, wasn't I,
grandfather?"

Mr. De Brunier scarcely waited to watch the
break-neck flight.  He was off with the sledge-driver to
the policeman's assistance.  He beckoned to the boys
to follow him at a cautious distance, judging it safer
than leaving them unguarded in Forgill's hut.

The policeman, seeing Yula had already arrested
Mathurin, turned to the two on the ground.  He
knocked the stone out of Maxica's hand, and
handcuffed Vanner.

Mr. De Brunier was giving his evidence on the
spot.  "I was warned there would be mischief here
before morning.  I sent my messenger for you, and
watched the house all night.  The Indian and the dog
were with me.  I saw this fellow attempt to break
in at that window.  The dog flew on him, dragged
him to the ground, and the Indian held him there.
That other man I denounce as an accomplice indoors,
evidently acting in concert with him."

Wilfred shook off Gaspé's arm and flew to Yula.
"Leave go," he said, "leave go."  His hands went
round the dog's throat to enforce obedience as he
whispered, "I am not quite a babby to choke him off
like that, am I?  Draw your leg up, Mathurin, and
run.  You meant to save me—I saw it in your face—and
I'll save you.  The porch-door stands open, run!"

Mathurin drew up his leg with a groan, but Yula's
teeth had gone so deeply into the flesh he could
scarcely move for pain.  If Mathurin could not run,
the sledge-driver could.  He was round the house and
through the porch before Mathurin could reach it.
He collared him by the kitchen-table, to Pête's
amazement.  Forgill burst out of the dining-room,
ready to identify him as one of their guests, and
was pushed aside.  The policeman was dragging in
his prisoner.

Mr. De Brunier held Wilfred by the arm.  "You
should not have done that," he was saying.  "Your
dog knew what he was about better than you did.
At any other time to call him off would only have
been humane and right, but in such circumstances—"

He never finished his sentence.  There was Mathurin
cowed and trembling at the sight of Yula, who was
marching into the porch with his head up and his
tail wagging in triumph.

Aunt Miriam, aghast and pale, stood in the doorway
of the dining-room.  Mr. De Brunier led her aside for
a word of explanation.  "The thieves among the guests
of her wedding party, incredible!"  She was stunned.

Yula seated himself in front of Mathurin, daring
him to move hand or foot.

Wilfred was looking round him for the Cree, who
was feeling for his bow and arrows, thrown somewhere
on the ground during his prolonged struggle.  When
the stone was struck from Maxica's grasp, and he
knew that Vanner was dragged off helpless, he felt
himself in the presence of a power that was mightier
than his own.  As Wilfred caught up the bow and
put it in his hand, he said solemnly, "You are safe
under the shadow of that great white warrior chief,
and Maxica is no longer needed; for as the horse is
as seven to the dog, so is the great white medicine as
seven to one, therefore the redman shuns his presence,
and here we part."

"Not yet, not yet," urged Wilfred desperately; but
whilst he was speaking the Cree was gone.  He had
vanished with the morning shadows behind the pine
trees.

Wilfred stretched out his arms to recall him; but
Gaspé, who had followed his friend like his shadow,
pulled him back.  "It would be but poor gratitude
for Maxica's gallant rescue to run your head into the
noose a second time," he said.  "With these hunters
lurking about the place, we ought to make our way
indoors as fast as we can."

The chill of the morning wrapped them round.
They were shivering in the icy mist, through which
the rising sun was struggling.  It was folly to linger.
Gaspé knew the Indian was afraid to trust himself in
the company of the policeman.

"Shall I never see him more?" burst out Wilfred
mournfully.

"Don't say that," retorted Gaspé.  "He is sure to
come again to Hungry Hall with the furs from his
winter's hunting.  You can meet him then."

"I?  I shall be at school at Garry.  How can I go
there?" asked Wilfred.

"At Garry," repeated his consoler, brightening.
"Well, from Garry you can send him anything you
like by the winter packet of letters.  You know our
postman, the old Indian, who carries them in his
dog-sled to every one of the Hudson Bay stations.  You
can send what you like by him to Hungry Hall.
Sooner or later it will be sure to reach your dusky
friend."

"It will be something to let him know I don't
forget," sighed Wilfred, whose foot was in his uncle's
porch, where safety was before him.

There was a sudden stillness about the place.  A
kind of paralysis had seized upon the household, as
it fell under the startling interdict of the
policeman: "Not a thing on the premises to be touched;
not an individual to leave them until he gave
permission."  This utter standstill was more appalling to
the farm-servants than the riotous confusion which
had preceded it.  The dread of what would come
next lay like a nightmare over master and men.

Wilfred scarcely looked at prisoners or policeman;
he made his way to his uncle.

"I can finish my prayer this morning, and I will—I
will try to do my duty.  Tell me what it is?"

"To speak the truth," returned old Caleb solemnly,
"without fear or prevarication.  No, no! don't tell
me beforehand what you are going to say, or that
fellow in the scarlet coat will assert I have tutored you."

Gaspé began to speak.

"No, no!" continued Uncle Caleb, "you must not
talk it over with your friend.  Sit down, my boy;
think of all that has happened in the night quietly
and calmly, and God help us to bear the result."

Again he rocked himself backwards and forwards,
murmuring under his breath, "My poor Miriam!  I
have two to think of—my poor, poor Miriam!"

Wilfred's own clear commonsense came to his aid;
he looked up brightly.  The old man's tears were
slowly trickling down his furrowed cheeks.  "Uncle,"
he urged, "my friends have not only saved me, they
have saved you all.  They stopped those fellows
short, before they had time to do their worst.  They
will not be punished for what they were going to do,
but for what they actually did do."

A sudden rush of gratitude came over Wilfred as
he recalled his peril.  His arms went round Gaspé
with a clasp that seemed to know no unloosening.  A
friend is worth all hazards.

His turn soon came.  Aunt Miriam had preceded
her nephew.  She had so little to tell.  "In the midst
of the dancing there was a cry of 'Thieves!'  The
men ran.  Her husband came back to her, bringing
her invalid brother to the safest part of the house.
He stayed to guard them, until there arose a second
cry, 'The police!'  She supposed the thieves made
off.  Her husband had started in pursuit."

In pursuit, when there was nothing to pursue; the
aggressor was already taken.  Aunt Miriam saw the
inevitable inference: her husband had fled with his
guests.  She never looked up.  She could not meet
the eyes around her, until she was asked if Vanner
and Mathurin were among her guests.  Her pale
cheeks grew paler.

Their own men were stupid and sleepy, and could
only stare at each other.  All they had had to say
confirmed their mistress's statements.

Mr. De Brunier had fetched Wilfred whilst his
aunt was speaking.  He looked at the men crowding
round the table, pushed between the sledge-driver and
Pête to where his aunt was standing, and squeezed
her hand.  There was just one look exchanged
between them.  Of all the startling events in that
strange night, it was strangest of all to Aunt Miriam
to see him there.  The fervency in the pressure she
returned set Wilfred's heart at ease.  One determination
possessed them both—not to make a scene.

Aunt Miriam got back into her own room; how,
she never knew.  She threw herself on her knees
beside her bed, and listened; for in that wood-built
house every word could be heard as plainly as if she
had remained in the kitchen.  Her grief and shame
were hidden, that was all.

Wilfred's clear, straightforward answers made it
plain there were no thieves in the case.  Her
wedding guests had set upon her little wanderer in the
moment of his return.

Vanner, scowling and sullen, never uttered a single
word.

Mathurin protested volubly.  He never meant to
let them hurt the boy, but some amongst them owed
him a grudge, and they were bent on paying it off
before they parted.

"A base and cowardly trick, by your own showing,
to break into an old man's room in the dead of the
night with a false alarm; not to mention your
behaviour to the boy.  If this outrage hastens the old
gentleman's end, you will find yourselves in a very
awkward position.  His seizure in the night was
solely due to the unwarrantable alarm," observed the
policeman.

Mathurin began to interrupt.  He checked him.

"If you have anything to say for yourself, reserve
it for the proper time and place; for the present you
must step into that sledge and come with me at
once.—Mr. De Brunier, I shall meet you and your son at
Garry on the twenty-ninth."

He marched his prisoners through the porch; a
sullen silence reigned around.  The sledge-bell
tinkled, the snow gleamed white as ever in the
morning sunshine, as Vanner and Mathurin left the
farm.

With the air of a mute at a funeral, Forgill bolted
the door behind them.  Mr. De Brunier walked into
the sleeping-room, to examine the scene of confusion
it presented for himself.

Aunt Miriam came out, leaving the door behind
her open, without knowing it.  She moved like one
in a dream.  "I cannot understand all this," she said,
"but we must do the thing that is nearest."

She directed Forgill to board up the broken window
and to see that the house was secure, and took Pête
with her to make up a bed for her brother in the
dining-room.  She laid her hand on Wilfred's shoulder
as she passed him, but the words died on her lips.

The men obeyed her without reply.  Forgill was
afraid to go out of the house alone.  As the cowman
followed him, he patted Yula's head, observing, "After
all that's said and done, it was this here dog which
caught 'em.  I reckon he's worth his weight in gold,
wherever he comes from, that I do."

Yula shook off the stranger's caress as if it were
an impertinent freedom.  His eye was fixed on two
small moccasined feet peeping out from under Aunt
Miriam's bed.

There was a spring, but Wilfred's hand was in
his collar.

"I know I had better stop him," he whispered,
looking up at Gaspé, as he thought of Mr. De
Brunier's reproof.

"Right enough now," cried Gaspé.  "Wilfred, it is
a girl."

He ran to the bed and handed out Bowkett's young
sister, Anastasia.  Her dress was of the universal
smoked skin, but its gay embroidery of beads and
the white ribbons which adorned it spoke of the
recent bridal.  Her black hair fell in one long, heavy
braid to her waist.

"Oh, you uncomplimentary creatures!" she exclaimed,
"not one of you remembered my existence;
but I'll forgive you two"—extending a hand to
each—"because you did not know of it.  I crawled in
here at the first alarm, and here I have lain trembling,
and nobody missed me.  But, I declare, you men
folk have been going on awful.  You will be the
death of us all some of these days.  I could have
knocked your heads together until I had knocked
some sense into you.  Put your pappoose in its cradle,
indeed!  I wish you were all pappooses; I would soon
let you know what I think of upsetting a poor old
man like that."

The indignant young beauty shook the dust from
her embroidery, and twirled her white ribbons into
their places as she spoke.

"Spoiling all the fun," she added.

"Now don't perform upon us, Miss Bowkett," put
in Gaspé.  "We are not the representatives of last
night's rowdyism.  My poor friend here is chief
sufferer from it.  Only he had a four-footed friend,
and a dark-skinned friend, and two others at the
back of them of a very ordinary type, but still friends
with hands and feet.  So the tables were turned,
and the two real representatives are gone up for
their exam."

"I daren't be the first to tell a tale like this in the
hunters' camp.  Besides," she demanded, "who is to
take me there?  This is what the day after brings," she
pouted, passing the boys as she went into the kitchen.
The guns which the hunters had left behind them
had been carefully unloaded by the policeman and
Mr. De Brunier, and were piled together in one
corner, waiting for their owners to reclaim them.
Every one knew the hunters could not live without
their trading guns; they must come back to fetch
them.  Anastasia, too, was aware she had only to
wait for the first who should put in an appearance to
escort her home.  Little was said, for Aunt Miriam
knew Anastasia's departure from Acland's Hut would
be Hugh Bowkett's recall.

When Mr. De Brunier understood this, his anxiety
on Wilfred's account was redoubled.

But when Uncle Caleb revived enough for conversation,
he spoke of the little business to be settled
between them, and asked for Mr. De Brunier.

"I have thought it all through," he said.  "In the
face of the Cree's warning, and all that happened
under this roof, I can never leave my nephew and
Hugh Bowkett to live together beneath it.  As
soon as he hears from his sister how matters stand
here, and finds sentence has been passed on Vanner and
Mathurin, he may come back at any hour.  I want
to leave my nephew to your care; a better friend he
could not have."

"As he has had it already, he shall always have it,
as if he were next to Gaspé, I promise you," was the
ready answer.

"I want a little more than that," Uncle Caleb
continued.  "I want you to take him away at once, and
send him back to school.  You spoke of buying land;
buy half of mine.  That will be Wilfred's portion.
Invest the money in the Hudson Bay Company,
where Bowkett can never touch it, and I shall feel
my boy is safe.  As for Miriam, she will still have a
good home and a good farm; and the temptation out
of his reach, Bowkett may settle down."

"I have no faith in bribery for making a man
better.  It wants the change here, and that is God's
work, not man's," returned Mr. De Brunier, tapping
his own breast.

Caleb Acland had but one more charge: "Let
nobody tell poor Miriam the worst."  But she knew
enough without the telling.

When Wilfred found he was to return to Garry
with his friends the next day his arms went round
his dogs, and a look of mute appeal wandered from
Mr. De Brunier to Aunt Miriam.

"Had not I better take back Kusky?" suggested
Gaspé.  "And could not we have Yula too?"

"Yula!" repeated Aunt Miriam.  "It is I who
must take care of Yula.  He shall never want a bone
whilst I have one.  I shall feed him, Wilfred, with
my own hands till you come back to claim him."

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   THE END.

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