aying down his rod and
searching in the bag in which he was wont to carry, among other things,
his pipe and tobacco.

A cry of pain from the tent in question--which was close behind the
pair--apprised the parents that something was wrong. Immediately their
first and only one issued with a tobacco pipe in one hand and a burnt
finger on the other. It came to the father for sympathy, and got it.
That is to say, La Certe put the burnt finger in his mouth for a moment,
and uttered some guttural expressions of sympathy. Having thus
fulfilled duty and relieved conscience, he exchanged the finger for the
pipe-stem, and began to smoke. The spoiled, as well as despoiled, child
uttered a howl of indignation, and staggered off to its mother; but she
received it with a smile of affectionate indifference, whereupon the
injured creature went back to the tent, howling, and, apparently, howled
itself to sleep.

Again La Certe broke the piscatorial spell that had settled down on
them, and, taking up the thread of discourse where he had dropped it,
repeated his statement that he had been wondering for a long time why
Cloudbrow, _alias_ young Duncan McKay, was so sharp and fierce in
denying that he knew anything about the murder of Henri Perrin.

"Hee! hee!" was Slowfoot's significant reply.

"Can Slowfoot not guess?" he asked, after attending to a hopeful nibble,
which came to nothing.

"Slowfoot need not guess; she _knows_," said the woman with an air of
great mystery.

"What does Slowfoot know?"

The woman's answer to this was a look of exceeding slyness. But this
did not content her lord, who, after repeated questions, and a threat to
resort to extreme measures in case of continued refusal, drew from her a
distinct answer.

"Slowfoot knows that Cloudbrow _killed_ Perrin."

"Sh!" exclaimed La Certe, with a look of real concern, "I am not yet
tired of you, Slowfoot; and if old McKay hears you say that he will
shoot you."

"Slowfoot is not a fool," retorted the woman: "the old man will never
hear her say that. What has Slowfoot got to do with it? She can hold
her tongue!"

"She can do that, for certain," returned her husband with good-natured
sarcasm. "In that, as in many things, she excels other women. I would
never have married her had it not been so. But how do you come to be so
sure?"

"I know the knife," returned the woman, becoming more literal as she
went on, "and Marie Blanc knows it. Her husband once g