The Indian stopped his speech abruptly and took a stride onward as if this circumstance was no concern of his. Dunvegan halted him, crying out:
"Hold there, Maskwa! Do you pretend to suspect Gaspard?"
Maskwa made a gesture of complete unconcern. "I have spoken," he returned placidly.
"Why," fumed Dunvegan, "such a thing in my estimation is incredible—preposterous! The idea of that dwarf, that idiot——No! It's too ridiculous!"
"I have spoken," repeated Maskwa, in the same even key.
When the chief trader attempted to question him by way of discovering his exact meaning, the Ojibway maintained a stubborn silence which he broke only with a suggestion about the night camp.
"Turn to the ridge of balsam, Strong Father," he advised. "We shall find it good to rest there."
Dunvegan accepted his trusted runner's hint. He knew that the Indian eye read wilderness signs which no white man living could ever interpret. He understood that the Indian brain gleaned an intelligence from inanimate things which the greatest mind of civilization could never comprehend. Therefore he was content to follow the native wisdom and follow it unseeingly, for at Maskwa's word he had walked blindly to his own ultimate advantage some hundreds of times.
So the Oxford House men diverged from their course on the first track that Gaspard Follet had tramped in the snowy ridge where it crossed Blazing Pine River. The Ojibway went ahead, and, when lost to the view of his fellows among the timber, he paralleled Gaspard's trail at some distance first on one side and then on the other. Soon he found what he sought and tramped on to the balsams, grunting with great satisfaction.
When Dunvegan and his retainers reached the balsam ridge, Maskwa stood there awaiting them. He called the chief trader aside.