“What?” he shouted. “Do you make a stranger of me? Do you exclude from your palaver one who speaks your tongue; who has smoked the peace-pipe and hunted with your brethren everywhere, from the Nipigon Lake to these very mountains, and from the white man’s gold-camps to the country of the Apaches and the Navajos; who has taught even the wisest of your tribe; who can charm away pains in the jaws, and can put new life into horses and dogs and cattle when they are sick?”
The muttered conversation broke off abruptly, and, with some approach to deference, the chief explained that it only related to the price which they should ask for guiding the Big White Chief, and to the doubts that some of them had as to the good faith of his followers. The Big White Chief (he stood six feet four) answered curtly that he would be answerable for his men, and, by way of payment, would give a supply of tobacco and rum to each Indian, and a revolver, with fifty 281 cartridges, to the leader. The last item clinched the bargain in a moment, and the chief at once agreed to show the way to a gorge through which the travellers and their beasts could pass with ease to the other side. This, he said, was more than a day’s journey away; if the white braves would stay the night at his camp, which they would reach by sundown, he would undertake to bring them to the gorge by noon on the following day.
“Go on, then,” said the Englishman. “I will inform my men and we will follow you”; and in a very few words he explained the situation to the Canadians, warning everyone to be on his guard.
The Indians, though laden with the spoils of a brief hunting expedition, set off at a rapid jog-trot, seeming quite heedless of the broken and ever-rising ground, over which the white men’s horses had much ado to keep pace with them. At times this difficult road gave place to a winding but well-worn track that seemed as though it would eventually lead, corkscrew fashion, to the summit of a mountain nearly ten thousand feet high.
Some distance up this, Lord called a halt for dinner, and, when it was ended, he had one of the mules disburthened, and, with much show of friendly condescension, insisted upon placing it at the chief’s disposal for the remainder of their climb. By this means he gained as it were a hostage in case of treachery; for it would be easy for one or other of his party to place himself between the now mounted chief and the rest of the Indians, with whom he had for a long time been carrying on a mysterious and disquieting conversation in an 282 undertone. Lord was a poor hand at playing eavesdropper, even had his life or liberty depended on that form of acquiring information; but, from odd syllables he had overheard from time to time, it had not been difficult to gather that his guides had become two factions, the one strongly disagreeing with the policy of the other.
Late in the afternoon the path wound suddenly into a thick grove of red and yellow cedars and Douglas firs; and the half-muffled sounds of life in the distance told the travellers that the Indian camp, or some other, could not be far away. The sounds soon separated themselves so that the barking of dogs, the blows of an axe on a tree-trunk, etc., could easily be distinguished; then lights peeped out among the trees, and the chatter of women and screaming of babies grew plainly audible.
Since he had been compelled to ride among the white men, the chief had become more and more moodily silent and ill at ease; and now the Indians ahead were throwing apprehensive glances back, and renewing their whispered arguments.
“What is it? What do they fear?” asked Lord of the chief, who was then riding abreast of him.
He answered nervously, “I will not deceive my great brother. They fear lest you or your companions should tell other white men what you will have seen at our camp.”
“And if we did?”