whether he had nightmare. He
thought he might waken up presently and find the dead weight smothering
his chest had been the boy snuggling close. He was vaguely conscious it
was strange of him to continue sleeping with that noise of shouting men
and whining hounds and snapping branches going on in the forest. The
child's lightest cry generally broke the spell of a nightmare; but the
din of terrified searchers rushing through the woods and of echoes
rolling eerily back from the white hills convinced him this was no
dream-land. Then, the distinct crackle of trampled brushwood and the
scratch of spines across his face called him back to an unendurable
reality.

"The thing is utterly impossible, Hamilton," I cried, when in short
jerky sentences, as if afraid to give thought rein, he had answered my
uncle's questioning. "Impossible! Utterly impossible!"

"I would to God it were!" he moaned.

"It was daylight, Eric?" asked Mr. Jack MacKenzie.

He nodded moodily.

"And she couldn't be lost in Charlesbourg forest?" I added, taking up
the interrogations where my uncle left off.

"No trace--not a footprint!"

"And you're quite sure she isn't in the house?" replied my relative.

"Quite!" he answered passionately.

"And there was an Indian encampment a few yards down the road?"
continued Mr. MacKenzie, undeterred.

"Oh! What has that to do with it?" he asked petulantly, springing to his
feet. "They'd moved off long before I went back. Besides, Indians don't
run off with white women. Haven't I spent my life among them? I should
know their ways!"

"But my dear fellow!" responded the elder trader, "so do I know their
ways. If she isn't in the Chateau and isn't in the woods and isn't in
the garden, can't you see, the Indian encampment is the only possible
explanation?"

The lines on his face deepened. Fire flashed from his gleaming eyes, and
if ever I have seen murder written on the countenance of man, it was on
Hamilton's.

"What tribe were they, anyway?" I asked, trying to speak indifferently,
for every question was knife-play on a wound.

"Mongrel curs, neither one thing nor the other, Iroquois canoemen,
French half-breeds intermarried with Sioux squaws! They're all connected
with the North-West Company's crews. The Nor'-Westers leave here for
Fort William when the ice breaks up. This riff-raff will follow in their
own dug-outs!"

"Know any of them?" persisted my uncle.

"No, I don't think I--Let me see! By Jov