ping herself to some very strong tea, which
she poured out of a tin kettle into a tin mug and sweetened with maple
sugar.

"Do you know if Cloudbrow went with them?" asked the half-breed, pushing
forward his mug for a supply of the cheering beverage.

"No, he stopped in his house," replied the woman, rousing herself for a
moment to the conversational point, but relapsing immediately.

The man spoke in patois French, the woman in her native Cree language.
For convenience we translate their conversation as near as may be into
the English in which they were wont to converse with the Scotch settlers
who, some time before, had been sent out by the Earl of Selkirk to
colonise that remote part of the northern wilderness.

La Certe's father was a French Canadian, his mother an Indian woman, but
both having died while he was yet a boy he had been brought or left to
grow up under the care of an English woman who had followed the fortunes
of the La Certe family. His early companions had been half-breeds and
Indians. Hence he could speak the English, French, and Indian languages
with equal incorrectness and facility.

"You don't like Cloudbrow," remarked the man with an inquiring glance
over the rim of his mug. "Why you not like him?"

"Hee! hee!" was Slowfoot's lucid reply. Then, with an unwonted frown on
her mild visage, she added with emphasis--

"No! I _not_ like him."

"I know that," returned the husband, setting down his mug and resuming
his pipe, "but why?"

To this the lady answered with a sound too brief to spell, and the
gentleman, being accustomed to his wife's little eccentricities, broke
into a hilarious laugh, and assured her that Cloudbrow was not a bad
fellow--a capital hunter and worthy of more regard than she was aware
of.

"For," said he, "Cloudbrow is willing to wait till spring for payment of
the horse an' cart I hired from him last year. You know that I could
not pay him till I go to the plains an' get another load of meat an'
leather. You will go with me, Slowfoot, an' we will have grand times of
it with buffalo-humps an' marrow bones, an' tea an' tobacco. Ah! it
makes my mouth water. Give me more tea. So. That will do. What a
noise the wind makes! I hopes it won't blow over the shed an' kill the
horse. But if it do I cannot help that. Cloudbrow could not ask me to
pay for what the wind does."

There came another gust of such violence, as he spoke, that even
Slowfoot's benignant e