e whole year round."

I took time to curse. I had never heard my giant prate of agriculture;
the camp and the tap-room had been his haunts. This appeared to be a
method of working toward ill news. I lay back on my rushes and tried
to fix his eye.

"Pierre, answer. Where is Labarthe?"

"I told the master"--

"Answer!"

"I don't know."

"Did he escape with you?"

Pierre rubbed his sleeve across his face. "The master will not listen.
I do not know about Labarthe. I saw him at camp yesterday morning.
The master saw him at the same time. Then the master went to the
swamp, and I went, too, with my Indian. But I kept behind. By and by
I saw the canoe upside down, and the master's cloak floating on the
water; by that I knew that the master was drowned or had got away. I
thought he had gone to the Malhominis, and I wanted to go, too. So I
killed my Indian, and hid him in the grass. I came by land."

I rose on my elbow, careless of my shoulder. "How could you kill the
Indian? You had no weapon."

Pierre stretched out his arms, knotted like an oak's branches, and
illustrated. "I hugged him. Once I broke the ribs of a bear."

I lay and wagged my head like an old man who hears of warlocks and
witch charms, and knows the tales to be true. The stupefying
simplicity of it! If you want a thing, take it. Pierre wanted to
follow me, so he killed his guard and came. That was all there was of
it. I looked at him long, my head still wagging. He had done this
sort of thing before. I had never understood it. It was this that I
meant when I had called Pierre, dull of wit as he seemed, the most
useful of my men.

I lay all day on my pallet, and Outchipouac served me with his own
hands.

"It is thus that we treat those whom we delight to honor," he said, and
he held the gourd to my lips and wiped my face with a square of linen
that some trader had left in camp. He would give me no solid food, but
dosed me with brewed herbs and great draughts of steaming broth. The
juggler looked into the lodge and would have tried his charms on me,
but Outchipouac sent him away.

A storm rose toward night, and I heard the knocking of the rain on the
skin roof above me, and thought of the woman traveling northward in the
Iroquois canoes. Starling was with her. I lay with tight-clenched
hands.

The storm swelled high. I asked that the mat be dropped from before
the door that I might see the lightning, and while I wat