d on through his interpreter at
great length. His talk had been a rambling declaration of friendship
for the white man. He had assured Kars that he, Kars, was held in
great personal esteem by the Indians. The last thing in any Indian
mind was a desire to shed his blood, or the blood of any of his
"braves," who fought so magnificently. He assured him that he had come
to say that all the Indians, even those who had been so very fierce,
and were now so no longer, would gladly smoke the pipe of peace with
their white brothers, and bury the hatchet now and forever.

Nor did he inform his audience of the events which had led up to this
desire, and of which he believed they must be ignorant. He failed to
mention that their own white leaders had vanished, literally in smoke,
that all supplies necessary to carry on the war had been completely cut
off by the destruction by fire of the magazine in which these things
were stored. On these matters he was discreetly reticent, and Kars was
satisfied that it should be so. On his part he had no desire to
enlighten him to the fact that, at that moment, Murray McTavish was
lying in the extemporized hospital in the camp with a shattered arm,
and that the half-breed, Louis Creal, was slowly dying with a bullet
through his lungs, under the same primitive shelter.

Kars had listened. And his whole attitude was one of clear-eyed
wisdom. He assured the crafty old man that he was certain of the Bell
River Indians' good faith. He was furthermore convinced that the men
of Bell River were the finest Indian race in the world, with whom it
was the whole object of a white man's life to live in peace. He was
certain that the recent events had been inspired by powers of evil
which had now been destroyed, and that he saw no obstacle to cementing
a lasting friendship with the Indians, which he was sure would lead to
happy days of plenty for the noble red man.

And so the farce had gone on to its end with truly Indian ceremonial.
But it did not come to a close until Kars had elicited from the old
rascal a complete story of the murder of Allan Mowbray. To him this
was of far more importance than all the rest of the old sinner's talk.
The story was extracted piecemeal, and was given in rambling, evasive
fashion. But it was given completely in the end, and with a veracity
which Kars had no reason to doubt.

It was a long enough story, which became a record of perfidy and crime
laid entirely a