“Who paid you to poison Hortense?  Who is Hortense?” I demanded; for his life was ebbing and the words portended deep wrong.

But his mind was wandering again, for he began talking so fast that I could catch only a few words.  “Blood!  Blood!  Colonel Blood!” Then “Swear it,” he cried.

That speech sapped his strength.  He sank back with shut eyes and faint breathings.

We forced a potion between his lips.

“Don’t let Gillam,” he mumbled, “don’t let Gillam . . . have the furs.”

A tremor ran through his stiffening frame.  A little shuddering breath—­and M. Picot had staked his last pawn in life’s game.

[1] In confirmation of Mr. Stanhope’s record it may be stated that on the western side of the northland in the Mackenzie River region are gas and tar veins that are known to have been burning continuously for nearly two centuries.

CHAPTER XXI

HOW THE PIRATES CAME

Inside our Habitation all was the confusion of preparation for leaving the bay.  Outside, the Indians held high carnival; for Allemand, the gin-soaked pilot, was busy passing drink through the loopholes to a pandemonium of savages raving outside the stockades.  ’Tis not a pretty picture, that memory of white-men besotting the Indian; but I must even set down the facts as they are, bidding you to remember that the white trader who besotted the Indian was the same white trader who befriended all tribes alike when the hunt failed and the famine came.  La Chesnaye, the merchant prince, it was, who managed this low trafficking.  Indeed, for the rubbing together of more doubloons in his money-bags I think that La Chesnaye’s servile nature would have bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank.  But, as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the knavery, the gin was nine parts rain-water.

“The more cheat, you, to lay such unction to your conscience,” says M. de Radisson.  “Be an honest knave, La Chesnaye!”

Foret, the marquis, stalked up and down before the gate with two guards at his heels.  All day long birch canoes and log dugouts and tubby pirogues and crazy rafts of loose-lashed pine logs drifted to our water-front with bands of squalid Indians bringing their pelts.  Skin tepees rose outside our palisades like an army of mushrooms.  Naked brats with wisps of hair coarse as a horse’s mane crawled over our mounted cannon, or scudded between our feet like pups, or felt our European clothes with impudent wonder.  Young girls having hair plastered flat with bear’s grease stood peeping shyly from tent flaps.  Old squaws with skin withered to a parchment hung over the campfires, cooking.  And at the loopholes pressed the braves and the bucks and the chief men exchanging beaver-skins for old iron, or a silver fox for a drink of gin, or ermine enough to make His Majesty’s coronation robe for some flashy trinket to trick out a vain squaw.  From dawn to dusk ran the patter of moccasined feet, man after man toiling up from river-front to fort gate with bundles of peltries on his back and a carrying strap across his brow.