"French Heart, the next one goes through your head," warned the Ojibway. "The password!"
The Nor'wester, staring into the deadly cylinder of steel, experienced a prickly, spreading sensation in the nerves of the forehead just between his eyes. He imagined the crashing impact of the leaden missile. He already felt the oozy bullet-hole.
Maskwa's eyes lanced him with bloody light which the coals infused. His spirit quivered under that knife. His nerves collapsed. He pitched forward on his face, reiterating the password in choking gasps.
"Marseillaise," he panted. "Marseillaise!"
The Ojibway tossed the man's sleeping robes over his fear-shaken visage. Abruptly he stalked back and dropped the pistol in Dunvegan's lap.
"You have heard, Strong Father?" he asked. "It is good! He spoke the truth, because he dared not lie. In the night of to-morrow we will enter the gates of the fort of the French Hearts with that password. I have spoken!"
Like a snake Maskwa slid into his fur blankets. Dunvegan followed, and the whole camp was soon still.
Gradually the banked logs of the fire broke in little falling rifts of coals. Uncombated, the frost advanced and screened the red glow with a gray hand. Across the valley of the Blazing Pine came the howling of wolves. Then of a sudden the winter aurora leaped out of the north, sweeping majestically from stars to earth-line. No rustling sound such as is heard within the Arctic Circle accompanied its movement. It came and vanished in mystic silence, only to reappear with twofold brilliance and multitudinous variations of hue. Up in the zenith a corona of dazzling splendor formed, and the miracle, continuing, left pulsating, nebulous rays walking the far-off, frozen shores.
The immensity of the wilderness reaches gave field for unlimited display. Flooded with resplendent light, the primal wastes of snow reflected every colored bar, every glorious cloud, every celestial flash. As a monstrous mirror to augment the radiance and multiply the lambent gleams, the speckless crust stretched on and on. The very earth seemed to acquire motion and to roll its snows in red and white undulating waves.
Wrapped in the sleep of utter weariness, lost to the hard facts of life, the sleepers lay in a realm of mysticism, of phantasmagoria. Thus all night across the world blazed this carnival of flame.