r Edwards was among them, his grave face
and flowing ringlets rising above them all. A man so ready to serve
anybody as he was idolized among frontiermen, whose gratitude is almost
equal to their revenge. Captain Oscar, the popular politician, who wore
his hair long and swore and drank, just to keep in with his widely
scattered constituents, whom he represented in the Minnesota Senate
each winter (and who usually cast half a dozen votes each for him),
made a buncombe speech, and then Edwards, who wouldn't drink, but who
knew how to tell strange stories, kept them laughing for half an hour.
Edwards was a type of man not so uncommon on the frontier as those
imagine who think the trapper always a half-horse, half-alligator
creature, such as they read of in the Beadle novels. I knew one trapper
who was a student of numismatics, another who devoted his spare time to
astronomy, and several traders and trappers who were men of
considerable culture, though they are generally men who are a little
morbid or eccentric in their mental structure. All Edwards's natural
abilities, which were sufficient to have earned him distinction had he
been "in civilization," were concentrated on the pursuits of his wild
life, and such a man always surpasses the coarser and duller Indian or
half-breed in his own field.

After a game of ball, and other sports imitated from the Indians, the
_bois brules_[1] began to be too much softened with whisky to keep up
athletic exercises, and something in their manner led Edwards to
suspect that there were other amusements on the programme into the
secret of which he had not been admitted.

[1] _Bois brules_, "burnt wood," is the title the half-breeds
apply to themselves, in allusion to their complexion.

By adroit management he contrived to overhear part of a conversation in
which "_poudre a canon_" was mixed up with the name of Linds_lee_. He
inferred that the blowing up of Lindsley's house was to finish the
celebration of the national holiday. Treating Bourdon to an extra glass
of whisky, and seasoning it with some well-timed denunciations of "the
old monster," he gathered that the plan was to plant a keg of powder
under the chimney on the north side of the cabin and blow it to pieces,
just to scare the monster out, or kill him and his daughter, it did not
matter which. Edwards praised the plan. He said that if it were not
that he had to go to Pelican Lake that very night he would go along an