There was a snarl through the glistening set teeth. The prostrate body gave an upward lurch. With one swift, treacherous thrust, he drove his knife into my coat-sleeve, grazing my forearm. The effort cost him his life. He sank down with a groan. The sightless, bloodshot eyes opened. Le Grand Diable would never more feign death.
I jerked the knife from my coat, hurled it from me, sprang up and fled from the field as if it had been infected with a pest, or I pursued by gends. Never looking back and with superstitious dread of the dead Indian's evil spirit, I tore on and on till, breath-spent and exhausted, I threw myself down with the North-West camp-fires in sight.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] It should scarcely be necessary for the author to state that these are the sentiments of the Indian poet expressing the views of the savage towards the white man, and not the white man towards the savage. The poem is as close a translation of the original ballad sung by Pierre in Metis dialect the night of the massacre, as could be given. The Indian nature is more in harmony with the hawk and the coyote than with the white man; hence the references. Other thoughts embodied in this crude lay are taken directly from the refrains of the trappers chanted at that time.
[B] Governor Semple unadvisedly boasted that the shock of his power would be felt from Montreal to Athabasca.
CHAPTER XXIV
FORT DOUGLAS CHANGES MASTERS
I suppose there are times in the life of every one, even the strongest—and I am not that—when a feather's weight added to a burden may snap power of endurance. I had reached that stage before encountering Le Grand Diable on the field of massacre at Seven Oaks. With the events in the Mandane country, the long, hard ride northward and this latest terrible culmination of strife between Nor'-Westers and Hudson's Bay, the past month had been altogether too hard packed for my well-being. The madness of northern traders no longer amazed me.