“Will you do me the honour to satisfy yourself that wound is genuine?”

“Pish!” says he.

He studied the ground.  “There’s nothing impossible on this earth.  Facts are hard dogs to down.—­Jean,” he called, “gather up the pelts!  It takes a man to trade well, but any fool can make fools drink!  Godefroy—­give the knaves the rum—­but mind yourselves,” he warned, “three parts rain-water!” Then facing me, “Take me to that bank!”

He followed without comment.

At the place of the camp-fire were marks of the struggle.

“The same boot-prints as on the sand!  A small man,” observed Radisson.

But when we came to the sloping bank, where the land fell sheer away to a dry, pebbly reach, M. Radisson pulled a puzzled brow.

“They must have taken shelter from the rain.  They must have been under your feet.”

“But where are their foot-marks?” I asked.

“Washed out by the rain,” said he; but that was one of the untruths with which a man who is ever telling untruths sometimes deceives himself; for if the bank sheltered the intruders from the rain, it also sheltered their foot-marks, and there was not a trace.

“All the same,” said M. de Radisson, “we shall make these Indians our friends by taking them back to the fort with us.”

“Ramsay,” he remarked on the way, “there’s a game to play.”

“So it seems.”

“Hold yourself in,” said he sententiously.

I walked on listening.

“One plays as your friend, the other as your foe!  Show neither friend nor foe your hand!  Let the game tell!  ’Twas the reined-in horse won King Charles’s stakes at Newmarket last year!  Hold yourself in, I say!”

“In,” I repeated, wondering at this homily.

“And hold yourself up,” he continued.  “That coxcomb of a marquis always trailing his dignity in the dust of mid-road to worry with a common dog like La Chesnaye—­pish!  Hold your self-respect in the chest of your jacket, man!  ’Tis the slouching nag that loses the race!  Hold yourself up!”

His words seemed hard sense plain spoken.

“And let your feet travel on,” he added.

“In and up and on!” I repeated.

“In and up and on—­there’s mettle for you, lad!”

And with that terse text—­which, I think, comprehended the whole of M. Radisson’s philosophy—­we were back at the beach.

The Indians were not in such a state as I have seen after many a trading bout.  They were able to accompany us.  In embarking, M. Radisson must needs observe all the ceremony of two races.  Such a whiffing of pipes among the stately, half-drunk Indian chiefs you never saw, with a pompous proffering of the stem to the four corners of the compass, which they thought would propitiate the spirits.  Jean blew a blast on the trumpet.  I waved the French flag.  Godefroy beat a rattling fusillade on the drum, grabbed up his bobbing tipstaff, led the way; and down we filed to the canoes.