It was immovable.  He tried the other.  It likewise refused his will.

So with both feet when he attempted, ever so cautiously, to move them.

He was bound hand and foot, and with cruel tightness, for with that tiny slipping of his muscles there set up all through him such a tingling and aching as was almost unbearable.

His head seemed a lump of lead, glued to whatever it lay upon, and big as a buttertub.

Turning his eyes far as he could to the right, he looked long in that direction.  Faintly, after a while, he picked out the straight line of the stockade top, the rising tower at the corner.  The line of the wall faded out in darkness the other way, strain as he might.  To the left were the ragged tops of the tepees, their two longer sticks pointing above the others.

From the sound of the river, he must be between it and the stockade gate.

Presently his numbed hearing became conscious of a sound somewhere near, a sound that had rung so ceaselessly since his waking that it had seemed the background for the lesser noise of the sentry’s slipping moccasin.  It was the weird, unending, unbeginning wail of the women, the death-song of the tribe mourning the passing of a chief, the voices of some four hundred squaws blending indescribably.

McElroy listened.

With consciousness of that his mind grew clearer and he began to think.

What a fool he had been!

Once more had he played like an unbalanced boy at the game of love.

What right had he to strike De Courtenay for kissing the woman whom he had won with his red flowers and his curls before the populace?  That he himself had fancied for a brief space that she was his was no excuse for plunging like a boy at his rival’s throat.  If he had held his peace, all would be well now and the old chief would not be lying stiff and stark somewhere in the shadowed camp, the women wailing without fires.

It was no balm to his sore heart that he in his blundering wrath had wrought this fresh disaster.  And his post, De Seviere, which he had won by daring service and loyalty to the H. B. C., what would become of it?

Who after him would rule on the Assiniboine?

For well he knew that death, and death thrice,—­aye, a million times refined,—­awaited so luckless a victim as he whose hand had killed the great chief.  But he had not killed Negansahima.  It was the gun in De Courtenay’s hand.  Ah, De Courtenay!  Where was De Courtenay?  A captive assuredly, if he was one.  They had both gone down together under the foam of that angry human sea.  And, if he was here, his antagonist must be somewhere near.  With exquisite torture, McElroy slowly turned his head to right and left.  At the second motion his face brushed something close against his shoulder.  It was cloth, a rough surface corrugated and encrusted with ridges,—­what but the braid on the blue coat of the Montreal gallant!