"Marseillaise!"
The gate bars rattled with release; a gap yawned in the stockade.
"Entrez," came the permission.
Walking with the leading sledge, Maskwa whirled as he passed the sentinel and felled him with a quick blow of the rifle butt. Quickly he removed the unconscious man's weapons and threw him on the sled.
"Strong Father, the thing is easy, as I told you," the Ojibway muttered to the first snow-coated giant guard, who was in reality Bruce Dunvegan.
"Too easy," was Bruce's answer. "Listen! There is no stir about the buildings, no sound. That puzzles me, Maskwa."
"Men sleep soundest just before the light breaks," explained the fort runner in a tone of satisfaction.
"Perhaps." Dunvegan's tone was doubtful.
As they stood in the palisade entrance, listening keenly for any cry which would mean their discovery, the pulses of the Hudson's Bay men surged faster and faster. The cold chill of the storm-beaten atmosphere changed suddenly to an electric glow. The fever of waiting strain flushed their bodies. They began to breathe hard and shift weapons from left hands to armpits and back again.
But no clamor beat out of the post structures; a ghostly blur they lay, walled round with gigantic drifts. The only vibration which communicated itself to the ear was the velvet brushing of falling snow against the high stockades.