nd twice did McElroy snatch the
groping hand away. Three times he passed swiftly for the inlaid handle
and, as if there lay luck in the number, the weapon flashed in the red
light.

Swift as was the draw, McElroy was swifter.

With an upward stroke he flung up the hand that held it. There was a
shot, ringing down the Assiniboine and echoing in the woods, and little
Francette by the stockade wall screamed. With the first flash of metal
Maren Le Moyne had gripped her hands until the nails cut raw, standing
where she had sprung at the stranger's kiss.

She could no more move than the bastioned wall behind her.

For a moment there was deathly silence after that shot. Then pandemonium
broke loose as Negansahima, chief of the Nakonkirhirinons, flung up his
arms, the dull metal bands with their inset stones catching the crimson
light, and fell into the outstretched arms of Edmonton Ridgar.

A long cry broke from his lips, the death-cry of a warrior.

CHAPTER XIII "A SKIN FOR A SKIN"

For a moment the whole evening scene, red with the late light, was set
in the mould of immobility. The two fighting men at sound of that cry
following hard upon the shot stopped rigidly, still clasped in the grip
of rage, the women staring wide-eyed from the wall, the Bois-Brules, the
leaning eager faces of the wild Nakonkirhirinons, the figure of the
girl in the foreground, all, all were stricken into stillness by that
dirge-like cry. For only the fraction of a second it held, that tense
waiting.

Then from nine hundred throats there shot up to the sky, turquoise
and pink and calm, such a sound as all the northland knew,--the wild
blood-cry of the savage.

It filled the arching aisles of the shouldering forest, rolled down the
breast of the river, and echoed in the cabins of the post, and with it
there broke loose the leashed wildness of the Indians. There was one
vast surging around the lodge where Ridgar knelt with the figure of the
chief in his arms, another where a tumbling horde fought to get to the
factor and De Courtenay.

At the stockade gate Prix Laroux, swift of foot and strong as twenty men
in the exigency of the moment, swept the women into his arms and rushed
them within the post. Above the hideous turmoil his voice rose in
carrying command,

"Into the post! Into the post,--every man inside! Man the rampart!"

It fell on ears startled into apathy by the suddenness of the tragic
happening, and there was a wild confu