“Ye ken not the value of the skins, nor how to show them off,” answered the other.  “Wherefore, for the consideration of a measure of rum, he’s engaged to help you in the trading.  As for his being half Indian, Gude guide us!  It’s been told me that no so many centuries ago the Highlandmen painted their bodies and went into battle without taking advantage even of feathers and silk grass.  One half of him is of the French nobeelity; he told me as much himself.  And the best of ye—­sic as the Campbells—­are no better than that.”

He looked at MacLean with a caustic smile.  The latter shrugged his shoulders.  “So long as you tie him neck and heels with a Campbell I am content,” he answered.  “Are you going?  I’ll just bar the windows and lock the door, and then I’ll be off with yonder copper cadet of a French house.  Good-day to you.  I’ll be back to-night.”

“Ye’d better,” said the overseer, with another widening of his thin lips.  “For myself, I bear ye no ill-will; for my grandmither—­rest her soul!—­came frae the north, and I aye thought a Stewart better became the throne than a foreign-speaking body frae Hanover.  But if the store is not open the morn I’ll raise hue and cry, and that without wasting time.  I’ve been told ye’re great huntsmen in the Highlands; if ye choose to turn red deer yourself, I’ll give ye a chase, and trade ye down, man, and track ye down.”

MacLean half turned from the window.  “I have hunted the red deer,” he said, “in the land where I was born, and which I shall see no more, and I have been myself hunted in the land where I shall die.  I have run until I have fallen, and I have felt the teeth of the dogs.  Were God to send a miracle—­which he will not do—­and I were to go back to the glen and the crag and the deep birch woods, I suppose that I would hunt again, would drive the stag to bay, holloing to my hounds, and thinking the sound of the horns sweet music in my ears.  It is the way of the earth.  Hunter and hunted, we make the world and the pity of it.”

Setting to work again, he pushed to the heavy shutters.  “You’ll find them open in the morning,” he said, “and find me selling,—­selling clothing that I may not wear, wine that I may not drink, powder and shot that I may not spend, swords that I may not use; and giving,—­giving pride, manhood, honor, heart’s blood”—­

He broke off, shot to the bar across the shutters, and betook himself in silence to the other window, where presently he burst into a fit of laughter.  The sound was harsh even to savagery.  “Go your ways, Saunderson,” he said.  “I’ve tried the bars of the cage; they’re too strong.  Stop on your morning round, and I’ll give account of my trading.”

The overseer gone, the windows barred, and the heavy door shut and locked behind him, MacLean paused upon the doorstep to look down upon his appointed companion.  The trader, half sitting, half reclining upon a log, was striking at something with the point of his hunting-knife, lightly, delicately, and often.  The something was a lizard, about which, as it lay in the sunshine upon the log, he had wrought a pen of leafy twigs.  The creature, darting for liberty this way and that, was met at every turn by the steel, and at every turn suffered a new wound.  MacLean looked; then bent over and with a heavy stick struck the thing out of its pain.