Agate! Agate! What picture did agate call back to my mind? A big squaw, with malicious eyes and gaping upper lip and girdle of agates, watching Louis Laplante and myself at the encampment in the gorge.
"Little Fellow!" I shouted, not suppressing my excitement. "Who is Le Grand Diable's wife?"
And the Indian answered in a low voice, with a face that showed me he had already penetrated my discovery, "The daughter of L'Aigle, chief of the Sioux."
Then I knew for whom those missiles had been intended and from whom they had come. It was a clever piece of rascality. Had the assassin succeeded, punishment would have fallen on my Indians.
CHAPTER VII
THE LORDS OF THE NORTH IN COUNCIL
Beyond the Sault, the fascinations of the west beckoned like a siren. Vast waterways, where a dozen European kingdoms could be dropped into one lake without raising a sand-bar, seemed to sweep on forever and call with the voice of enchantress to the very ends of the earth. With the purple recesses of the shore on one side and the ocean-expanse of Lake Superior on the other, all the charms of clean, fresh freedom were unveiling themselves to me and my blood began to quicken with that fevered delight, which old lands are pleased to call western enthusiasm. Lake Huron, with its greenish-blue, shallow, placid waters and calm, sloping shores, seemed typical of the even, easy life I had left in the east. How those choppy, blustering, little waves resembled the jealousies and bickerings and bargainings of the east; but when one came to Lake Superior, with its great ocean billows and slumbering, giant rocks and cold, dark, fathomless depths, there was a new life in a hard, rugged, roomy, new world. We hugged close to the north coast; and the numerous rocky islands to our left stood guard like a wall of adamant between us and the heavy surf that flung against the barrier. We were rapidly approaching the headquarters of our company. When south-bound brigades, with prisoners in hand-cuffs, began to meet us, I judged we were near the habitation of man.
"Bad men?" I asked Little Fellow, pointing to the prisoners, as our crews exchanged rousing cheers with the Nor'-Westers now bound for Montreal.