miles had passed under my
horse's hoofs, but so accustomed had I grown to travel that I felt just
as ready to set out again as though only twenty miles had been traversed.
The excitement of the last few hours steering by the stars in an unknown
country, and its most successful denouement, had put fatigue and
weariness in the background; and as we sat down to a well-cooked supper
of buffalo steaks and potatoes, with the brightest eyed little lassie,
half Cree, half Scotch, in the North-west to wait upon us, while a great
fire of pine wood blazed and crackled on the open hearth, I couldn't help
saying to my companions, "Well, this is better than your hill-top and the
fireless bivouac in the rustling willows."

Fort Pitt was free from small-pox, but it had gone through a fearful
ordeal: more than one hundred Crees had perished close around its
stockades. The unburied dead lay for days by the road-side, till the
wolves, growing bold with the impunity which death among the hunters ever
gives to the hunted, approached and fought over the decay ing bodies.
From a spot many marches to the south the Indians had come to the fort in
midsummer, leaving behind them a long track of dead and dying men over
the waste of distance. "Give us help," they cried, "give us help, our
medicine-men can do nothing against this plague; from the white man We
got it, and it is only the white man who can take it away from us."

But there was no help to be given, and day by day the wretched band grew
less. Then came another idea into the red man's brain: "If we can only
give this disease to the white man and the trader in the fort," thought
they, "we will cease to suffer from it ourselves;" so they came into the
houses dying and disfigured as they were, horrible beyond description to
look at, and sat down in the entrances of the wooden houses, and
stretched themselves on the floors and spat upon the door-handles. It was
no use, the fell disease held them in a grasp from which there was no
escape, and just six weeks before my arrival the living remnant fled away
in despair.

Fort Pitt stands on the left or north shore of the Saskatchewan River,
which is here more than four hundred yards in width. On the opposite
shore immense bare, bleak hills raise their wind-swept heads seven
hundred feet above the river level. A few pine-trees show their tops some
distance away to the north, but no other trace of wood is to be seen in
that vast amphitheatre of dry