travels. Besides, Antoine was six feet high, and
broad shouldered, and well made, with a dark face and glossy black hair;
and he entertained a notion that there were one or two points in his
costume which required to be carefully rectified, ere he could consider
that he had attained to perfection: so he brushed the long hair off his
forehead, crossed his arms, and gazed around him.

"Come now, Antoine," said Peter, throwing a green blanket at him, "I
know you want _that_ to begin with. What's the use of thinking so long
about it, eh? And _that_, too," he added, throwing him a blue cloth
capote. "Anything else?"

"Oui, oui, monsieur," cried Antoine, as he disengaged himself from the
folds of the coat which Peter had thrown over his head. "Tabac,
monsieur, tabac!"

"Oh, to be sure," cried Peter. "I might have guessed that _that_ was
uppermost in your mind. Well, how much will you have?" Peter began to
unwind the fragrant weed off a coil of most appalling size and thickness
which looked like a snake of endless length. "Will that do?" and he
flourished about four feet of the snake before the eyes of the voyageur.

Antoine accepted the quantity, and young Harry Somerville entered the
articles against him in a book.

"Anything more, Antoine?" said the trader. "Ah, some beads and silks,
eh? Oho, Antoine!--By the way, Louis, have you seen Annette lately?"

Peter turned to another voyageur when he put this question, and the
voyageur gave a broad grin as he replied in the affirmative, while
Antoine looked a little confused. He did not care much, however, for
jesting. So, after getting one or two more articles--not forgetting
half a dozen clay pipes, and a few yards of gaudy calico, which called
forth from Peter a second reference to Annette--he bundled up his goods,
and made way for another comrade.

Louis Peltier, one of the principal guides, and a man of importance
therefore, now stood forward. He was probably about forty-five years of
age; had a plain, olive-coloured countenance, surrounded by a mass of
long jet-black hair, which he inherited, along with a pair of dark,
piercing eyes, from his Indian mother; and a robust, heavy, yet active
frame, which bore a strong resemblance to what his Canadian father's had
been many years before. His arms, in particular, were of herculean
mould, with large, swelling veins and strongly-marked muscles. They
seemed, in fact, just formed for the purpose of pulling the h