“I was bushwhacked myself,” Smoke said.  “Look at the hole in my parka.”

While Blackbeard examined it, one of the voyageurs threw open the breech of the dead man’s gun.  It was patent to all that it had been fired once.  The empty cartridge was still in the chamber.

“A damn shame poor Joe didn’t get you,” Blackbeard said bitterly.  “But he did pretty well with a hole like that in him.  Come on, you.”

“Search the other bank first,” Smoke urged.

“You shut up an’ come on, an’ let the facts do the talkin’.”

They left the trail at the same spot he had, and followed it on up the bank and then in among the trees.

“Him dance that place keep him feet warm,” Louis pointed out.  “That place him crawl on belly.  That place him put one elbow w’en him shoot.”

“And by God there’s the empty cartridge he done it with!” was Blackbeard’s discovery.  “Boys, there’s only one thing to do—­”

“You might ask me how I came to fire that shot,” Smoke interrupted.

“An’ I might knock your teeth into your gullet if you butt in again.  You can answer them questions later on.  Now, boys, we’re decent an’ law-abidin’, an’ we got to handle this right an’ regular.  How far do you reckon we’ve come, Pierre?”

“Twenty mile, I t’ink for sure.”

“All right.  We’ll cache the outfit an’ run him an’ poor Joe back to Two Cabins.  I reckon we’ve seen an’ can testify to what’ll stretch his neck.”

It was three hours after dark when the dead man, Smoke, and his captors arrived at Two Cabins.  By the starlight, Smoke could make out a dozen or more recently built cabins snuggling about a larger and older cabin on a flat by the river bank.  Thrust inside this older cabin, he found it tenanted by a young giant of a man, his wife, and an old blind man.  The woman, whom her husband called “Lucy,” was herself a strapping creature of the frontier type.  The old man, as Smoke learned afterwards, had been a trapper on the Stewart for years, and had gone finally blind the winter before.  The camp of Two Cabins, he was also to learn, had been made the previous fall by a dozen men who arrived in half as many poling-boats loaded with provisions.  Here they had found the blind trapper, on the site of Two Cabins, and about his cabin they had built their own.  Later arrivals, mushing up the ice with dog teams, had tripled the population.  There was plenty of meat in camp, and good low-pay dirt had been discovered and was being worked.

In five minutes, all the men of Two Cabins were jammed into the room.  Smoke, shoved off into a corner, ignored and scowled at, his hands and feet tied with thongs of moose-hide, looked on.  Thirty-eight men he counted, a wild and husky crew, all frontiersmen of the States or voyageurs from Upper Canada.  His captors told the tale over and over, each the center of an excited and wrathful group.  There were mutterings of:  “Lynch him now!  Why wait?” And, once, a big Irishman was restrained only by force from rushing upon the helpless prisoner and giving him a beating.