ested by the distinct sound of
pain-racked groaning. Then the brute of a dog detected my approach and
with a furious leaping that almost hung him with his own rope set up a
vicious barking. Suddenly the black head of an Indian, or trapper,
popped through the tent flaps and a voice shouted in perfect
English--"Go away! Go away! The pest! The pest!"

"Who has smallpox?" I bawled back.

"A trader, a Nor'-Wester," said he. "If you have anything for him lay it
on the snow and I'll come for it."

As honor pledged me to serve Hamilton until he found his wife, I was not
particularly anxious to exchange civilities at close range with a man
from a smallpox tent; so I quickly retraced my way to the gorge and
hurried homeward with The Mute. My old school-fellow's sudden change
towards me when he received the letter written on Citadel paper, and the
big squaw's suspicion of my every movement, now came back to me with a
significance I had not felt when I was at the camp. Either intuitions
like those of my _habitant_ guide, which instinctively put out feelers
with the caution of an insect's antennae for the presence of vague,
unknown evil, lay dormant in my own nature and had been aroused by the
incidents at the camp, or else the mind, by the mere fact of holding
information in solution, widens its own knowledge. For now, in addition
to the letter from the Citadel and the squaw's animosity, came the one
missing factor--Adderly. I felt, rather than knew, that Louis Laplante
had deceived me. Had he lied? A lie is the clumsy invention of the
novice. An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything so grossly
and tangibly honest as a lie; and Louis was an expert. Though I had not
a vestige of proof, I could have sworn that Adderly and the squaw and
Louis were leagued against me for some dark purpose. I was indeed
learning the first lessons of the trapper's life: never to open my lips
on my own affairs to another man, and never to believe another man when
he opened his lips to me.

CHAPTER IV

LAUNCHED INTO THE UNKNOWN

"You should have knocked that blasted quarantine's head off," ejaculated
Mr. Jack MacKenzie, with ferocious emphasis. I had been relating my
experience with the campers; and was recounting how the man put his head
out of the tent and warned me of smallpox. But my uncle was a gentleman
of the old school and had a fine contempt for quarantine.

"Knocked his head off, knocked his head off, Sir," he continued,