vous?_"

As their hearts seemed to be as stout as their limbs, they would, he
reflected, be unconquerable, these careless children of waste places.
While Brock thus communed, he watched. There was little to choose
between them--Narcisse, Baptiste, Louis, Jacques, Pierre--all strong as
buffalo, all agile as catamounts.

They would lift the "pieces" from the dripping canoe and land them on
the slippery rock. A minute later and Narcisse perhaps would appear, a
bit bent, to keep balanced a bag of flour, a chest of tea, a caddy of
tobacco and sundry packages of sugar or shot that made up the load
resting on his shoulders where body and nape of neck joined. This load
was supported and held together by a broad moose-hide band--a
tump-line--strapped across his forehead, his upraised hands grasping the
narrowing moose-hide stretched on either side of his lowered head,
between ear and shoulder. Brock would watch these packmen as, thus
handicapped with a load weighing from two to five hundred pounds, they
set out across the rough portage, singing, and at a dog trot, following
each other in quick succession. There was rivalry, of course, duly
encouraged by Brock with a promise of tobacco to the first man in, but
it was all good-natured competition, the last man chanting his laughing
canzonet as loudly as the first.

Our hero, with his grand physique and cleverness, was not long in
mastering the tricks of the carriers. He soon learned to build up a load
and adjust a tump-line, after which practice made the carrying of a pack
almost twice his own weight a not extraordinary performance.

These trips afforded Brock an opportunity to study Indian character. He
learned much from the packman and voyageur that was destined to be of
great value to him in his career on the western frontier, among the
outposts of civilization.

Little escaped his notice. His faculties were sharpened by contact with
these children of the wilds, whose only class-room was the forest, their
only teacher, nature. As the crushed blade or broken twig were of
deepest import to the Indian scout, so no incident of his life was now
too trivial for Brock to dismiss as of no importance.

CHAPTER VII.

MUTINY AND DESERTION.

Brock could hardly reconcile the degree of punishment inflicted upon the
soldiers, the poorly paid defenders of the Empire, with their casual
offences. While he rebelled against the brutalities of some officers, he
was powerless to p