ut.

CHAPTER XV.

THE BAD DOCTOR.

At the edge of the thicket they stopped and stood face to face, each
waiting for the other to pass ahead. Tegakwita slightly bowed, with an
unconscious imitation of the Frenchmen he had seen at Fort Frontenac
and Montreal.

"Pass on," said Menard, sternly. "You know the trail, Tegakwita; I do
not. It is you who must lead the way."

The Indian was sullen, but he yielded, plunging forward between the
bushes, and now and then, in the shadow of some tree, glancing
furtively over his shoulder. His manner, the suspicion that showed
plainly in the nervous movements of his head, in every motion as he
glided through thicket, glade, or strip of forest, told Menard that he
had chosen well to take the second place. His fingers closed firmly
about the handle of the hatchet. That he could throw at twenty paces
to the centre of a sapling, no one knew better than Tegakwita.

The city of the dead lay in a hollow at ten minutes' walk from the
village. Generations ago the trees had been cleared, and no bush or
sapling had been allowed a foothold on this ground. The elms and oaks
and maples threw their shadows across the broad circle, and each
breath of wind set them dancing over the mounds where many an hundred
skeletons crouched side by side, under the grass-grown heaps of earth,
their rusted knives and hatchets and their mouldy blankets by their
sides. No man came here, save when a new heap of yellow earth lay
fresh-turned in the sun, and a long line of dancing, wailing redmen,
led by their howling doctors, followed some body that had come to
claim its seat among the skeletons.

Tegakwita paused at the edge of the clearing, and looked around with
that furtive quickness. Menard came slowly to his side.

"You will take your weapons to the grave?" asked Menard, very quietly,
but with a suggestion that the other understood.

"Yes. Tegakwita has no place for his weapons. He must carry them where
he goes."

"We can leave them here. The leaves will hide them. I will put the
hatchet under this log." He made a motion of dropping the hatchet,
closely watching the Indian; then he straightened, for Tegakwita's
right hand held the musket, and his left rested lightly on his belt,
not a span from his long knife.

"The White Chief knows the danger of leaving weapons to tempt the
young braves. He finds it easy to take the chance with Tegakwita's
hatchet."

"Very well," said Menard, sternly. "Le