“What does Slowfoot know?”
The woman’s answer to this was a look of exceeding slyness. But this did not content her lord, who, after repeated questions, and a threat to resort to extreme measures in case of continued refusal, drew from her a distinct answer.
“Slowfoot knows that Cloudbrow killed Perrin.”
“Sh!” exclaimed La Certe, with a look of real concern, “I am not yet tired of you, Slowfoot; and if old McKay hears you say that he will shoot you.”
“Slowfoot is not a fool,” retorted the woman: “the old man will never hear her say that. What has Slowfoot got to do with it? She can hold her tongue!”
“She can do that, for certain,” returned her husband with good-natured sarcasm. “In that, as in many things, she excels other women. I would never have married her had it not been so. But how do you come to be so sure?”
“I know the knife,” returned the woman, becoming more literal as she went on, “and Marie Blanc knows it. Her husband once got the loan of it from Cloudbrow, and she looked at it with care, because she had never seen such a knife before. She knew all its marks. Why does Cloudbrow deny that it is his? Because it was Cloudbrow who killed Perrin. If it had been anybody else he would have known it, and he would have said so—for he was there.”
“How know you that he was there?”
“Marie Blanc knows. She netted the snowshoes that Cloudbrow wore, and she saw the footprints.”
“But pairs of snowshoes are very like each other,” objected La Certe.