rned from the city at noon, they were gone! I
looked to the window as I came back. The curtain moved and I thought my
boy was hiding, but it was only the wind. We've searched every nook from
cellar to attic. His toys were littered about and I fancied I heard his
voice everywhere, but no! No--no--and we've been hunting house and
garden for hours----"

"And the forest?" questioned Uncle Jack, the trapper instinct of former
days suddenly re-awakening.

"The forest is waist-deep with snow! Besides we beat through the bush
everywhere, and there wasn't a track, nor broken twig, where they could
have passed." His torn clothes bore evidence to the thoroughness of that
search.

"Nonsense," my uncle burst out, beginning to bluster. "They've been
driven to town without leaving word!"

"No sleigh was at Chateau Bigot this morning," returned Hamilton.

"But the road, Eric?" I questioned, recalling how the old manor-house
stood well back in the center of a cleared plateau in the forest.
"Couldn't they have gone down the road to those Indian encampments?"

"The road is impassable for sleighs, let alone walking, and their winter
wraps are all in the house. For Heaven's sake, men, suggest something!
Don't madden me with these useless questions!"

But in spite of Eric's entreaty my excitable kinsman subjected the
frenzied man to such a fire of questions as might have sublimated
pre-natal knowledge. And I stood back listening and pieced the
distracted, broken answers into some sort of coherency till the whole
tragic scene at the Chateau on that spring day of the year 1815, became
ineffaceably stamped on my memory.

Causeless, with neither warning nor the slightest premonition of danger,
the greatest curse which can befall a man came upon my friend Eric
Hamilton. However fond a husband may be, there are things worse for his
wife than death which he may well dread, and it was one of these
tragedies which almost drove poor Hamilton out of his reason and changed
the whole course of my own life. In broad daylight, his young wife and
infant son disappeared as suddenly and completely as if blotted out of
existence.

That morning, Eric light-heartedly kissed wife and child good-by and
waved them a farewell that was to be the last. He rode down the winding
forest path to Quebec and they stood where the Chateau garden merged
into the forest of Charlesbourg Mountain. At noon, when he returned, for
him there existed neither wife nor child.