n the agate belt; but Larocque, good fellow, never took his
beady eyes off those same hands and kept a grip of the leaping pole.

Thus we examined the tents and made a circuit of the people round the
fire, but found nothing to reveal the whereabouts of Miriam and the
child. Laplante and I were on one side of the robe, Larocque and the
squaw on the other.

"And why is that tent apart from the rest and who is in it?" I asked
Laplante, pointing to the lone tepee on the crest of the hill.

The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence
among the loungers of the camp. They were listening as well as watching.
Up to this time I had not thought they were paying the slightest
attention to us. Laplante was not answering, and when I faced him
suddenly I found the squaw's eyes fastened on his, holding them whether
he would or no, just as she had mine.

"Eh! man?" I cried, seizing him fiercely, a nameless suspicion getting
possession of me. "Why don't you answer?"

The spell was broken. He turned to me nonchalantly, as he used to face
accusers in the school-days of long ago, and spoke almost gently, with
downcast eyes, and a quiet, deprecating smile.

"You know, Rufus," he answered, using the schoolboy name. "We should
have told you before. But remember we didn't invite you here. We didn't
lead you into it."

"Well?" I demanded.

"Well," he replied in a voice too low for any of the listeners but the
squaw to hear, "there's a very bad case of smallpox up in that tent and
we're keeping the man apart till he gets better. That, in fact, is why
we're all here. You must go. It is not safe."

"Thanks, Laplante," said I. "Good-by." But he did not offer me his hand
when I made to take leave.

"Come," he said. "I'll go as far as the gorge with you;" and he stood on
the embankment and waved as we passed into the lengthening shadows of
the valley.

Now, in these days of health officers and vaccination, people can have
no idea of the terrors of a smallpox scourge at the beginning of this
century. The _habitant_ is as indifferent to smallpox as to measles, and
accepts both as dispensations of Providence by exposing his children to
the contagion as early as possible; but I was not so minded, and hurried
down the gorge as fast as my snow-shoes would carry me. Then I
remembered that the Indian population of the north had been reduced to a
skeleton of its former numbers by the pestilence in 1780, and recalled
that m