As they reached the top, Brochet finished his brief account of the affair in the fur-house.
The Factor took it in silence. Not so Granger!
"The game old devil!" he cried. "He sure kept his nerve to the last. But he has made himself thunderin' hard to identify. Eh, Macleod? I guess you can't swear to his identity now!"
"You should have arrested him as soon as you placed him at La Roche," the Factor answered. "And found me afterwards."
"Don't talk nonsense! We'd look fine playing a single-handed game like that, wouldn't we? It had to be worked a different way. You both had assumed names. We didn't know which was which. So we had to nail our plan in the middle and let it swing at both ends. You see how it swung? If we had to take you, the Northwest Company would fight for us. If we had to take Ferguson, the Hudson's Bay Company sure was at our backs! Good Lord—what's here? A quarry?"
A quarry indeed it looked, a huge, black cave amid the rocks, the heart of the granite headland blown out by a titanic blast. They stood on the edge of the slope, gazing at the torches of the Hudson's Bay men as they swarmed like gnomes in the bowels of the pit. They clustered and spread and crawled here and there, round the sides of the chasm, up over its lips, where ghostly as bale-fires little heaps of wreckage smoldered and flamed.
Then the reluctant lights came back one by one, and the tale of the bearers ran the same.
"Nothing!"
"Not a body!"
"Not a limb!"