Chaumon had that holy horror of the law and its ways which every wild or semi-wild man possesses.  There is nothing so terrible to the savage as the idea of imprisonment; the wilder the bird the harder he will feel the cage.  The next thing to imprisonment in Chaumon’s mind was a Government proclamation—­a thing all the more terrible because he could not read a line of it nor comprehend what it could be about.  Chaumon’s face was a study when I handed him three different proclamations and one copy of “The Small-pox in Three Stages.”  Whether he ever reached the Coteau and his friends the Sioux I don’t know, for I soon passed on my way; but if that lively bit of literature, entitled “The Small-pox in Three Stages,” had as convincing an impression on the minds of the Sioux as it had upon Chaumon, that he was doing something very reprehensible indeed, if he could only find out what it was, abject terror must have been carried far over the Coteau and the authority of the law fully vindicated along the Missouri.

On Sunday morning the 30th of October we reached a high bank overlooking’ a deep valley through which rolled the Assineboine River.  On the opposite shore, 300 feet above the current, stood a few white houses surrounded by a wooden palisade.  Around, the country stretched away on all sides in magnificent expanses.  This was Fort Ellice, near the junction of the Qu’Appelle and Assineboine Rivers, 230 miles west from Fort Garry.  Fording the Assineboine, which rolled its masses of ice Swiftly against the shoulder and neck of my horse, we climbed the steep hill, and gained the fort.  I had ridden that distance in five days and two hours.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The Hudson Bay Company—­Furs and Free Trade—­Fort Ellice—­Quick
Travelling-Horses—­Little Blackie—­Touchwood Hills—­A Snow-storm—­The
South Saskatchewan—­Attempt to cross the River—­Death of poor
Blackie—­Carlton.

It may have occurred to some reader to ask, What is this company whose name so often appears upon these pages?  Who are the men composing it, and what are the objects it has in view?  You have glanced at its early history, its rivalries, and its discoveries, but now, now at this present time, while our giant rush of life roars and surges along, what is the work done by this Company of Adventurers trading into the Bay of Hudson?  Let us see if we can answer.  Of the two great monopolies which the impecuniosity of Charles Ii. gave birth to, the Hudson Bay Company alone survives, but to-day the monopoly is one of fact, and not of law.  All men are now free to come and go, to trade and sell and gather furs in the great Northern territory, but distance and climate raise more formidable barriers against strangers than law or protection could devise.  Bold would be the trader who would carry his goods to the far away Mackenzie River; intrepid would be the voyageur who sought a profit from the lonely shores of the great