Chapter V
I
The country round Fort Walsh lay deep in snow. The cold was intense. Darkness was falling.
Hector, turning back to the stove from this cheerless prospect, thanked God that no law-breaker—no whiskey-runner especially—was likely to be out on such a day, and hence, that he himself was unlikely to be required to take the trail.
He looked at the thermometer hanging in the window.
"Thirty below!" he said to himself. "I pity the poor Nitchies in their teepees."
The poor Indians well merited a little pity. This was, for them, a small-pox winter, a famine winter. Throughout the district, they were dying by thousands. The Mounted Police were working hard to save them, issuing rations and ammunition to the bands that crowded to them for aid. There were men out on the job at that moment. But they could do very little among so many.
Hector, dozing by the fire, thought suddenly of Moon and Sleeping Thunder, contrasting the terrible situation of to-day with that seen in the happy camp at Milk River months before. He wondered if any harm had come to them.
The door swung open to admit MacFarlane.