this complaint from a Hudson's Bay man.

"No! That's why I nearly finished him; but the more I clubbed, the more he jabbered impertinence, 'Cooloo! cooloo! qu' importe! It doesn't matter!' By Jove! I made it matter!"

"Is that all about Diable, Eric?" continued my uncle.

He ran his fingers distractedly back through his long, black hair, rose, and, coming over to me, laid a trembling hand on each shoulder.

"Gillespie!" he muttered through hard-set teeth. "It isn't all. I didn't think at the time, but the morning after the row with that red devil I found a dagger stuck on the outside of my hut-door. The point was through a fresh[Pg 33] sprouted leaflet. A withered twig hung over the blade."

[Pg 33]

"Man! Are you mad?" cried Jack MacKenzie. "He must be the very devil himself. You weren't married then—He couldn't mean——"

"I thought it was an Indian threat," interjected Hamilton, "that if I had downed him in the fall, when the branches were bare, he meant to have his revenge in spring when the leaves were green; but you know I left the country that fall."

"You were wrong, Eric!" I blurted out impetuously, the terrible significance of that threat dawning upon me. "That wasn't the meaning at all."

Then I stopped; for Hamilton was like a palsied man, and no one asked what those tokens of a leaflet pierced by a dagger and an old branch hanging to the knife might mean.

Mr. Jack MacKenzie was the first to pull himself together.

"Come," he shouted. "Gather up your wits! To the camping ground!" and he threw open the door.

Thereupon, we three flung through the club-room to the astonishment of the gossips, who had been waiting outside for developments in the quarrel with Colonel Adderly. At the outer porch, Hamilton laid a hand on Mr. MacKenzie's shoulder.

"Don't come," he begged hurriedly. "There's a storm blowing. It's rough weather, and a rough[Pg 34] road, full of drifts! Make my peace with the man I struck."

[Pg 34]

Then Eric and I whisked out into the blackness of a boisterous, windy night. A moment later, our horses were dashing over iced cobble-stones with the 

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