e! Yes, Gillespie!" he shouted,
"Le Grand Diable was among them!"

"What about Diable?" I asked, pinning him down to the subject, for his
mind was lost in angry memories.

"What about him? He's my one enemy among the Indians," he answered in
tones thick and ominously low. "I thrashed him within an inch of his
life at Isle a la Crosse. Being a Nor'-Wester, he thought it fine game
to pillage the kit of a Hudson's Bay; so he stole a silver-mounted
fowling-piece which my grandfather had at Culloden. By Jove, Gillespie!
The Nor'-Westers have a deal of blood to answer for, stirring up those
Indians against traders; and if they've brought this on me----"

"Did you get it back?" I interrupted, referring to the fowling-piece,
neither my uncle, nor I, offering any defense for the Nor'-Westers. I
knew there were two sides to this complaint from a Hudson's Bay man.

"No! That's why I nearly finished him; but the more I clubbed, the more
he jabbered impertinence, '_Cooloo! cooloo! qu' importe!_ It doesn't
matter!' By Jove! I made it matter!"

"Is that all about Diable, Eric?" continued my uncle.

He ran his fingers distractedly back through his long, black hair, rose,
and, coming over to me, laid a trembling hand on each shoulder.

"Gillespie!" he muttered through hard-set teeth. "It isn't all. I didn't
think at the time, but the morning after the row with that red devil I
found a dagger stuck on the outside of my hut-door. The point was
through a fresh sprouted leaflet. A withered twig hung over the blade."

"Man! Are you mad?" cried Jack MacKenzie. "He must be the very devil
himself. You weren't married then--He couldn't mean----"

"I thought it was an Indian threat," interjected Hamilton, "that if I
had downed him in the fall, when the branches were bare, he meant to
have his revenge in spring when the leaves were green; but you know I
left the country that fall."

"You were wrong, Eric!" I blurted out impetuously, the terrible
significance of that threat dawning upon me. "That wasn't the meaning at
all."

Then I stopped; for Hamilton was like a palsied man, and no one asked
what those tokens of a leaflet pierced by a dagger and an old branch
hanging to the knife might mean.

Mr. Jack MacKenzie was the first to pull himself together.

"Come," he shouted. "Gather up your wits! To the camping ground!" and he
threw open the door.

Thereupon, we three flung through the club-room to the astonishment of
the gossips, wh