ved. He was saying, or trying to say, something.

"Speak louder!" and I bent over him. "Speak the truth and I take you to
the camp!"

The lips were still moving, but I could not hear a sound.

"Speak louder!" I shouted. "Where is Miriam? Where is the white woman?"
I put my ear to his lips, fearful that life might slip away before I
could hear.

There was a snarl through the glistening set teeth. The prostrate body
gave an upward lurch. With one swift, treacherous thrust, he drove his
knife into my coat-sleeve, grazing my forearm. The effort cost him his
life. He sank down with a groan. The sightless, bloodshot eyes opened.
Le Grand Diable would never more feign death.

I jerked the knife from my coat, hurled it from me, sprang up and fled
from the field as if it had been infected with a pest, or I pursued by
gends. Never looking back and with superstitious dread of the dead
Indian's evil spirit, I tore on and on till, breath-spent and exhausted,
I threw myself down with the North-West camp-fires in sight.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] It should scarcely be necessary for the author to state that these
are the sentiments of the Indian poet expressing the views of the savage
towards the white man, and not the white man towards the savage. The
poem is as close a translation of the original ballad sung by Pierre in
Metis dialect the night of the massacre, as could be given. The Indian
nature is more in harmony with the hawk and the coyote than with the
white man; hence the references. Other thoughts embodied in this crude
lay are taken directly from the refrains of the trappers chanted at that
time.

[B] Governor Semple unadvisedly boasted that the shock of his power
would be felt from Montreal to Athabasca.

CHAPTER XXIV

FORT DOUGLAS CHANGES MASTERS

I suppose there are times in the life of every one, even the
strongest--and I am not that--when a feather's weight added to a burden
may snap power of endurance. I had reached that stage before
encountering Le Grand Diable on the field of massacre at Seven Oaks.
With the events in the Mandane country, the long, hard ride northward
and this latest terrible culmination of strife between Nor'-Westers and
Hudson's Bay, the past month had been altogether too hard packed for my
well-being. The madness of northern traders no longer amazed me.

An old nurse of my young days, whom I remember chiefly by her ramrod
back and sharp tongue, used to say, "Nerves! nerves! nothing bu