remarked. "What a funny song! I cannot call it lively, though."

"Lively be hanged!" burst out the Canadian at her elbow, who had never been so rude before. "It's a death song. Look out, mates. Au guet, camarades!" with a great shout, "This red nigger's turned 'bad!'"

The savage responded to the accusation by a defiant whoop. Fifty different spots sent up its echo, and what seemed wolves bounded up out of the snow here and there in the gathering gloom.

It was too late for the hunters to attempt a seizure of the steersman. Already they were paralyzed, as they had partly arisen, by beholding the snow plain unexpectedly end in a sheer descent. Two seconds after the first sledge was over the precipice; in five the second followed. Three or four men leaped out of this—of the other it was impossible to do so in time, and it sank in the snow of which their leap broke the crust. The conductors of the dog sledges began plying their whips, and the yelping of the dogs rent the frosty air. Upon these fugitives, scattered on each side, the fifty dark figures shot arrows with almost a fatal aim.

By night, in about half an hour only, no living representative of the party seemed forthcoming. Till then the assailing force had not relaxed their murderous intentions. Dragging the dog sledges to a hollow, where they could light a fire unobserved, they greedily feasted on the provisions, with the additional dainty of one of the dogs roasted for "fresh meat!"

In the morning they descended into the chasm where the Indian guide had so deliberately wrecked the "canoes-that-slide-on-the-snow." None of the fallen had survived the descent as far as they could be found in the snow. They were smothered, or the cold had killed them in the long night. Over the whites the Indians showed no emotion save a brutal rejoicing. But it was different when they discovered the body of their countryman. Not only were they a little perplexed how to regard a suicide which so profited the tribe, for the Indian rarely commits that crime, but Sandy Ferguson, chancing to be hurled near the villain, had dragged himself, though his limbs were dislocated, so as to fall on him, and had half torn off his scalp when death had fastened his icy grip on him.

The joy of the victors was thus damped. They sang over their martyr-hero, and, bestowing on his corpse the prizes he would have won if alive, gave him a chief's burial.

"He was a great man, and Ahnemekee (the Thunderbolt) gives 

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