uncan Cameron. "Hut-tut! We'll
teach him to respect warrants issued under authority of 43d King George
III.," and the dictator of Fort Gibraltar fussed angrily among the
papers of his desk and beat a threatening tattoo with knuckles and
heels.

The Assiniboine enters the Red at something like a right angle and in
this angle was the Nor'-Westers' fort, named after an old-world
stronghold, because we imagined our position gave us the same command of
the two waterways by which the _voyageurs_ entered and left the north
country as Gibraltar has of the Mediterranean. Governor McDonell had
thought to outwit us by building the Hudson's Bay fort a mile further
down the current of the Red. It was a sharp trick, for Fort Douglas
could intercept Nor'-West brigades bound from Montreal to Fort
Gibraltar, or from Fort Gibraltar to the Athabasca. Two days after our
arrival, Cuthbert Grant, with a band of _Bois-Brules_, had gone to Fort
Douglas to arrest Captain Miles McDonell for plundering Nor'-West posts.
The doughty governor took Grant's warrant as a joke and scornfully
turned the whole North-West party out of Fort Douglas. On the stockades
outside were proclamations commanding settlers to take up arms in
defense of the Hudson's Bay traders and forbidding natives to sell furs
to any but our rivals. These things added fuel to the hot anger of the
chafing _Bois-Brules_. A curious race were these mongrel plain-rangers,
with all the savage instincts of the wild beast and few of the brutal
impulses of the beastly man. The descendants of French fathers and
Indian mothers, they inherited all the quick, fiery daring of the
Frenchman, all the endurance, craft and courage of the Indian, and all
the indolence of both white man and red. One might cut his enemy's
throat and wash his hands in the life blood, or spend years in
accomplishing revenge; but it is a question if there is a single
instance on record of a _Bois-Brule_ molesting an enemy's family. When
the Frenchman married a native woman, he cast off civilization like an
ill-fitting coat and virtually became an Indian. When the Scotch settler
married a native woman, he educated her up to his own level and if she
did not become entirely civilized, her children did. One was the wild
man, the Ishmaelite of the desert, the other, the tiller of the soil,
the Israelite of the plain. Such were the tameless men, of whom Cuthbert
Grant was the leader, the leader solely from his fitness to lead.