ger now and
not so peacefully inclined. Nightly the French bullies, well plied with
whisky, would come across to the Hudson's Bay fort, bawling out challenge
to fight; but Robertson held his men in hand and kept his powder dry.

Early on the morning of October the 11th, Robertson's valet roused him
from bed with word that a man had been accidentally shot. Slipping a
pistol in his pocket and all unsuspicious of trickery, Robertson dashed
out. It happened that the most of his men were at a slight distance from
his fort. Before they could rally to his rescue he was knocked down,
disarmed, surrounded by the Nor'westers, thrown into a boat, and carried
back to their fort a captive. In vain he stormed almost apoplectic with
rage, and tried to send back Indian messengers to his men. The
Nor'westers laughed at him good-naturedly and relegated him to quarters
in one room of a log hut, where sole furnishings were a berth bed and a
fireplace without a floor. Robertson's only possessions in captivity
were the clothes on his back, a jackknife, a small pencil, and a
notebook; but he probably consoled himself that his men were now on
guard, and, outnumbering the Nor'westers two to one, could hold the
ground for the Hudson's Bay that winter. As {403} time passed the
captive Robertson began to wrack his brains how to communicate with his
men. It was a drinking age; and the fur traders had the reputation of
capacity to drink any other class of men off their legs. Robertson
feigned an unholy thirst. Rapping for his guard, he requested that
messengers might be sent across to the Hudson's Bay fort for a keg of
liquor. It can be guessed how readily the Nor'westers complied; but
Robertson took good care, when the guard was absent and the door locked,
to pour out most of the whisky on the earth floor. Then taking slips of
paper from his notebook, he cut them in strips the width of a spool. On
these he wrote cipher and mysterious instructions, which only his men
could understand, giving full information of the Nor'westers' movements,
bidding his people hold their own, and ordering them to send messages
down to the new Hudson's Bay governor at Red River,--William
Williams,--to place his De Meuron soldiers in ambush along the Grand
Rapids of the Saskatchewan to catch the Northwest partners on their way
to Montreal the next spring. These slips of paper he rolled up tight as
a spool and hammered into the bunghole of the barrel. Then