"Where can Hamilton be?" said I, losing interest in the traders' quarrel as soon as they went into details.
"Home with his wifie," half sneered the officer in a nagging way, that irritated me, though the remark was, doubtless, true. "Home with his wifie," he repeated in a sing-song, paying no attention to the elucidation of a subject he had raised. "Good old man, Hamilton, but since marriage, utterly gone to the bad!"
"To the what?" I queried, taking him up short. This officer, with the pudding cheeks and patronizing insolence, had a provoking trick of always keeping just inside the bounds of what one might resent. "To the what, did you say Hamilton had gone?"
"To the domestics," says he laughing, then to the others, as if he had listened to every word of the explanations, "and if His Little Excellency, Governor MacDonell, by the grace of Lord Selkirk, ruler over gentlemen adventurers in no-man's-land, expels the good Nor'-Westers from nowhere to somewhere else, what do the good Nor'-Westers intend doing to the Little Tyrant?"
"Charles the First him," responds a wag of the club.
"Where's your Cromwell?" laughs the colonel.
"Our Cromwell's a Cameron, temper of a Lucifer, oaths before action," answers the wag.
"Tuts!" exclaims Uncle Jack testily. "We'll settle His Lordship's little martinet of the plains. Warrant for his arrest! Fetch him out!"
"Warrant 43rd King George III. will do it," added one of the partners who had looked the matter up.
"43rd King George III. doesn't give jurisdiction for trial in Lower Canada, if offense be committed elsewhere," interjects a lawyer with show of importance.