That evening, when the voyagers had settled down about their leaping fire, nothing would have aroused the suspicion of the observer as to what was about to take place. The seven canoe men, who were from among the People of the Lake, had decided upon an action which, to their minds, seemed advantageous to themselves, as well as in accordance with the excise laws of the Dominion, but which was prompted above all by fidelity to their friends among the People of the Interior. These men of the People of the Lake had known from former years’ experience what it would mean for their friends of the forest to be turned back to their distant hunting grounds with nothing but the remains of a drunken orgy to meet their requirements for the coming winter. Therefore had they decided, with great moral satisfaction, in the interests of self, of government, and of mankind exactly what their correct course should be.
Before the evening had worn away, Antoine felt himself enjoying the best of spirits. He did not notice, when one of the men asked him to pass the matches, that two of the others behind him were fumbling among some tangled thongs and ropes. He did not notice, until too late, a quick movement by which he was thrown on his back and quickly bound hand and foot, his hands behind his back. Attempts to reach his sheath-knife, frantic yells, squirmings, and attempts to bite the binding thongs were lost in a roar of laughter which greeted him when he was tumbled to one side of the camp like a strangled bear, to curse in French, and threaten them with every dreadful thing that the northern Indian has learned to fear. They only laughed at him as his store clothes became grimy and his urbane veneer disappeared. They laughed all the more, these merry Men of the Lake, when the boxes had been broken open with their keen axes and the corks pulled from a score of flat bottles, whose limpid contents disappeared down their throats between gurgles of liquid and gurgles of laughter and jokes.
Now for two days this merry camp of Bacchus made the forests echo with songs and cries, some from the throats of the Men of the Lake, growing louder each hour, others growing feebler each hour from the throat of Antoine. Had the People of the Interior been within hearing distance, they might have thought that a band of marauding enemies had engaged one another in warfare on their peaceful river. And no doubt they would have gone into concealment until some of their scouts could have learned the cause of it. But it so happened that they were delayed many miles up the river at one of the portages; several invalids had required attention. When all were able to resume their journey they descended by easy stages to favor the condition of their patients.
It was not until the second day after the demolition of the boxes and their contents in Antoine’s bivouac, that the flotilla carrying the People of the Interior swung around a point of the river, and came down upon the camp, where by this time all the merrymakers were strewn about in a profound sleep. Cautiously and reverently stepping ashore, the foremost men in the canoes of the People of the Interior believed that they had come upon a camp of the dead, although, as they afterward remarked, the odor pervading the air was not exactly of a funereal taint. It took but a few moments for them to connect the circumstances. It took but a few more for them to connect with a dozen of the flat bottles whose contents had either been reserved for this special occasion by the thoughtful Men of the Lake, or had been overlooked in the surge of feeling which had followed their first attack upon the load. It now became the turn of the People of the Interior to show solicitude for those men of the People of the Lake, who had so sacrificed their loyalty to their employer for the sake of their kinsmen. Even Antoine was stripped of his thongs and stood upon his feet. But two days of fasting and exposure in the damp moss in his wet store clothes, with nothing to eat or drink, had about exhausted his constitution. His companions were the first to resuscitate, and it was from their lips that the story of the event was learned by the bewildered People of the Interior.
A day or so later, refreshed with sleep, fresh fish, and cold water, the whole company pushed off from the shore. The People of the Interior continued their journey to the Post, but among some of them a change had taken place which was to affect in particular the relationship of two individuals. These two were Good-ground and Mirage.
Frank G. Speck
