To Dick and Sam Bolton the traverse was a simple matter.  Sam, by the aid of his voyager’s sash, easily carried the supplies and blankets; Dick fastened the two paddles across the thwarts to form a neck-yoke, and swung off with the canoe.  Then they returned to the plateau until their savage friends should have finished the crossing.

Ordinarily white men of this class are welcome enough to travel with the Indian tribes.  Their presence is hardly considered extraordinary enough for comment.  Sam Bolton, however, knew that in the present instance he and Dick aroused an unusual interest of some sort.

He was not able to place it to his own satisfaction.  It might be because of Bolton’s reputation as a woodsman; it might be because of Dick Herron’s spectacular service to Haukemah in the instance of the bear; it might be that careful talk had not had its due effect in convincing the Indians that the journey looked merely to the establishment of new winter posts; Sam was not disinclined to attribute it to pernicious activity on the part of the Ojibway.  It might spring from any one of these.  Nor could he quite decide its quality;—­whether friendly or inimical.  Merely persisted the fact that he and his companion were watched curiously by the men and fearfully by the women; that they brought a certain constraint to the camp fire.

Finally an incident, though it did not decide these points, brought their ambiguity nearer to the surface.

One evening old Haukemah received from the women the bear’s robe fully tanned.  Its inner surface had been whitened and then painted rudely with a symbolical representation of the hunt.  Haukemah spoke as follows, holding the robe in his hand: 

“This is the robe of makwa, our little brother.  His flesh we all ate of.  But you who killed him should have his coat.  Therefore my women have painted it because you saved their head man.”

He laid the robe at Dick’s feet.  Dick glanced toward his companion with the strange cast flickering quizzically in his narrow eyes.  “Fine thing to carry along on a trip like ours,” he said in English. “I don’t know what to do with it.  They’ve worked on it mighty near a week.  I wish to hell they’d keep their old robe.”  However, he stooped and touched it in sign of acceptance.  “I thank my brother,” he said in Cree.

“You’ll have to bring it along,” Sam answered in English.  “We’ll have to carry it while we’re with them, anyway.”

The Indian men were squatted on their heels about the fire, waiting gravely and courteously for this conference, in an unknown tongue, to come to an end.  The women, naturally interested in the disposal of their handiwork, had drawn just within the circle of light.

Suddenly Dick, inspired, darted to this group of women, whence he returned presently half dragging, half-coaxing a young girl.  She came reluctantly, hanging back a little, dropping her head, or with an embarrassed giggle glancing shyly over her shoulder at her companions.  When near the centre of the men’s group, Dick dropped her hand.