hen among the shadowy green of the foliage, an open space suddenly
resolved itself into a human face and there looked out upon us gleaming
eyes like those of a crouching panther.

"Squeamish fool!" muttered the Nor'-Wester, raising his arm.

"Stop!" I implored. "We are watched. See!" and I pointed to the face,
that as suddenly vanished into blackness.

We both leaped into the thicket, pistol in hand, to wreak punishment on
the interloper. There was only an indistinct sound as of something
receding into the darkness.

"Don't fire," said I, "'twill alarm the camp."

At imminent risk to our own lives, we poked sticks through the thicket
and felt for our unseen enemy, but found nothing.

"Let's go back and peg him out on the sand, where the Hudson's Bay will
see him when they come this way," suggested the Nor'-Wester, referring
to Laplante.

"Yes, or hand-cuff him and take him along prisoner," I added, thinking
Louis might have more information.

But when we stepped back to the beach, there was no Louis Laplante.

"He was too drunk to go himself," said I, aghast at the certainty, which
now came home to me, that we had been watched.

"I wash my hands of the whole affair," declared the trader, in a state
of high indignation, and he strode off to his tent, I, following, with
uncomfortable reflections trooping into my mind. Compunctions rankled in
self-respect. How near we had been to a brutal murder, to crime which
makes men shun the perpetrators. Civilization's veneer was rubbing off
at an alarming rate. This thought stuck, but for obvious reasons was not
pursued. Also I had learned that the worst and best of outlaws
easily justify their acts at the time they commit them; but
afterwards--afterwards is a different matter, for the thing is past
undoing.

I heard the trader snorting out inarticulate disgust as he tumbled into
his tent; but I stood above the embers of the camp fire thinking. Again
I felt with a creepiness, that set all my flesh quaking, felt, rather
than saw, those maddening, tiger eyes of the dark foliage watching me.
Looking up, I found my morose canoeman on the other side of the fire,
leaning so close to a tree, he was barely visible in the shadows.
Thinking himself unseen by me, he wore such an insolent, amused,
malicious expression, I knew in an instant, who the interloper had been,
and who had carried Louis off. Before I realized that such an act
entails life-long enmity with an Indian, I had b