As soon as Red Knife believed that his instructions were consummated, he waved his hand to the parleyer, who was eyeing him anxiously.
"My friends are welcome. Let four of them come into the camp unarmed."
All resistance was useless. One solitary Half-breed was left in charge of the five horses and his comrades' arms on the river brink. All he could do, if the others were treacherously murdered, was make a breastwork of the quadrupeds and fire away to his last shot, and then be slain.
Red Knife and his lieutenants received the crestfallen Canadians courteously, and conducted them silently to the council fire. There the Piegans sat down and invited their guests to do likewise. During the long silence that ensued the entrapped ones looked well about them. The two fugitives had shaken themselves reasonably dry, exchanged their wet outer garments for dry ones and were warming themselves at the priests' holy fire in the medicine lodge, where the totem pole was standing sentry, so to say, over the tribal ark within.
"Why have the palefaces come into my camp?" inquired the Piegan at length, in a stern voice. "What is the news for us? There is no common tie between the palefaces and the Blackfeet."
The tone, like the question, was not amicable. Moreover, the hunters had noticed that the pipe had not been offered them, so that they knew they were being treated as enemies, not as mere strangers even.
The leader of the Red River Half-breeds was their captain himself. He was supported by David Steelder, to whom Kidd has alluded as an undesirable acquaintance, whilst Margottet was guarding the horses and weapons as one in a most trustworthy and ticklish post.
Steelder was a stout, herculean fellow, with flaming red hair and beard, though his eyes were dark. But they so squinted, and shifted their point of view so frequently, that most would not have remarked this incompatibility. He alone looked round on the red men with the idle curiosity of one whose brain was congested or softening.
Dagard was too learned in Indian ways not to appreciate the hostility of the reception. But he was fearless, cunning, and accustomed to meet emergencies without flinching.
"I have walked into the Piegan camp to sit at the council fire," he said, firmly, "and put in a request that my red brothers are not the fools to throw aside hastily."