Mitchell looked up and round at that instant. At his explosive oath, the Frenchmen wheeled like a flash. For a moment there was a deathly silence, while the four men glared at the boy with scowling faces. Fred realized that not only the possession of the stones, but probably his life, hung on his presence of mind.
"Those things are my brother's, Mr. Mitchell," he said, with an outward coolness that astonished himself. "He hid them in this cabin. I don't know how you came to find them, but I'll ask you to hand them back."
His voice broke the spell of silence. One of the French said something in the ear of another, and then dropped quietly back toward the corner where the men's four rifles stood together.
But Mitchell swept the pebbles together back into the bag. "Your brother's?" he said. "Why, I bought 'em myself from a gang of Ojibwas down on Timagami. Rock crystals they call 'em, and I reckon to get ten or twelve dollars for 'em at Cochrane."
He spoke with such assurance that Fred was taken aback, and did not know what to say. Then his eye fell on one of the scraps of paper in which a stone had been wrapped. He leaned forward and picked it up.
"Did you put this on it?" he exclaimed indignantly. "Look! It's my brother's handwriting. 'October second, Nottaway River, near Burnt Lake,' it says. That's where he found it. And look at that!" He swept his hand round the devastated cabin. "What did you tear the place to pieces for if you weren't hunting for something?"
"They're mine, anyway," retorted the woodsman, slipping the precious bag into his pocket. "Them papers was wrapped round 'em when I got 'em."
"Impossible!" said Fred. "I tell you—"
"Shut up!" said Mitchell suddenly, with a snarl.
A sense of his peril cooled Fred's anger like an icy douche, and he was silent. There was death in the four grim faces that regarded him. He had no doubt that the men would murder for a far less sum than the value of that sackful of precious stones.