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The two fighting men at sound of that cry following hard upon the shot stopped rigidly, still clasped in the grip of rage, the women staring wide-eyed from the wall, the Bois-Brules, the leaning eager faces of the wild Nakonkirhirinons, the figure of the girl in the foreground, all, all were stricken into stillness by that dirge-like cry.
Here the blue sky was mirrored faithfully below with its lazy clouds, the green shores rimmed away to right and left, and the swarming canoes, with their gleaming paddles, made a picture well worth looking at. The Nakonkirhirinons were going back to the Pays d'en Haut by another way than that by which they had come.
They were ready for anything that might happen in this unknown country into which they journeyed at the word of their friends the Assiniboines, given at the buffalo hunt the fall before, above the Great Slave Lake. Never before had the Nakonkirhirinons been so far in the south.
Surely have we fallen on the lap of fortune.... Those Indians, Nakonkirhirinons from the far north and strangers in this country, came to De Seviere to trade. For two three dais, maybe more, I have lost track of time, M'sieu, they passed up and down at the trading, camped on the shore, and all seemed well, though they were wild and shy as partridges.
The tears were welling to her weary eyes. "The Nor'wester, Alfred de Courtenay, also We only of that venture are escaped alive, a sorry showing. The five men who man my boat belong to the brigade under Mr. Mowbray, which we met on Winnipeg. Such is our small history, M'sieu, and all we ask is your protection out of the reach of the Nakonkirhirinons.
Northward along Nelson River went the concourse of the Nakonkirhirinons, turning westward into the chain of little lakes above Winnipeg of which Dupre had spoken, sweeping forward over portage and dalle, and after them came the lone canoe, leaping the leagues like a loup-garou, for it never rested.
As the confusion and uproar grew in intensity, one after another joined the dancing circle, until it seemed that every brave in the camp was leaping around the fire. Blue-eyed Indians, Bois-Brules, Nakonkirhirinons, they circled and uttered the monotonous "Ah-a, ah-a," and in the light could be seen the white lock on the temple of Bois DesCaut.
At that moment a stentorian call pealed above the dismantled camp, and there began a vast surge of the mass of Nakonkirhirinons toward the waiting canoes, a dragging of goods and chattels, a hurry of crying children, a scurrying of squaws.
Then an Indian, naked and painted like a fiend, whose toes turned out, stepped forth and spoke in good English. "Woman Who Follows," he said distinctly, "one of these two dogs is a murderer, having killed the Great Chief when his people came in peace to trade at the Fort. Therefore, one of them must die. The Nakonkirhirinons take a skin for a skin, not two skins for one.
Then he was swung, still bound, into the bottom of a canoe, saw De Courtenay tossed into another, felt the careless feet of Nakonkirhirinons as the paddlemen stepped in, and existence became a thing of gliding motion, the lapping of water on birchbark, and the passing of a long strip of cloud-flecked sky, pink and blue and gold with the new day.
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