Cameron as the grey light came in through the dirty
windows and the cracks between the logs of the grub-house. Already
Little Thunder was awake and busy with the fire in the cracked and rusty
stove. Cameron lay still and watched. Silently, swiftly the Indian moved
about his work till the fire began to roar and the pot of snow on the
top to melt. Then the trader awoke. With a single movement he was out
upon the floor.

"All hands awake!" he shouted. "Aha, Mr. Cameron! Good sleep, eh? Slept
like a bear myself. Now grub, and off! Still blowing, eh? Well, so
much the better. There is a spot thirty miles on where we will be snug
enough. How's breakfast, Little Thunder? This is our only chance to-day,
so don't spare the grub."

Cameron made but slight reply. He was stiff and sore with the cold and
the long ride of the day before. This, however, he minded but little. If
he could only guess what lay before him. He was torn between anxiety and
indignation. He could hardly make himself believe that he was alive and
in his waking senses. Twenty-four hours ago he was breakfasting with
McIvor and his gang in the camp by The Bow; now he was twenty or thirty
miles away in the heart of the mountains and practically a prisoner in
the hands of as blood-thirsty a looking Indian as he had ever seen, and
a man who remained to him an inexplicable mystery. Who and what was
this man? He scanned his face in the growing light. Strength, daring,
alertness, yes, and kindliness, he read in the handsome, brown, lean
face of this stranger, lit by its grey-brown hazel eyes and set off
with brown wavy hair which the absence of a cap now for the first time
revealed.

"He looks all right," Cameron said to himself. And yet when he recalled
the smile that had curled these thin lips and half closed these hazel
eyes in the cave the night before, and when he thought of that murderous
attack of his Indian companion, he found it difficult wholly to trust
the man who was at once his rescuer and his captor.

In the days of the early eighties there were weird stories floating
about through the Western country of outlaw Indian traders whose chief
stock for barter was a concoction which passed for whiskey, but the
ingredients of which were principally high wines and tobacco juice, with
a little molasses to sweeten it and a touch of blue stone to give
it bite. Men of reckless daring were these traders, resourceful and
relentless. For a bottle of their "hell-fire