“You’ll have them,” said the captain. “I’ve no doubt there will be five hundred redskins before the stockade within a day or two, and then they’ll give you sharp work. And a drifting snowstorm will be in their favor.”
“I don’t see it,” replied Griffith Hawke. “What do you mean?”
The captain shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing in particular,” he answered evasively. “By the way, Hawke, when are you to marry Miss Hatherton?”
As he spoke he jerked one arm toward the priest, who was still talking by the fire, and then gave me a swift glance of amused contempt. The factor also turned his eyes upon me, and I felt my face grow hot.
“I am to be married to-morrow,” he replied half-sadly. “At least, that is the present arrangement. But I have been thinking of late—”
He was interrupted, to my vast relief, by the sudden opening of a door behind him. Mr. Christopher Burley entered the room, looking as if he might have just stepped from the legal chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. He had evidently made a careful toilet, his traveling costume being discarded for a suit of sober black.
He nodded severely to Captain Rudstone, who he had seen earlier in the evening, and I observed a slight confusion in the bearing of both, clearly due to the recollection of their quarrel at the Silver Lily. Then, with an affable smile, the law clerk offered me his hand.
“I am pleased to see you, Mr. Carew,” he said. “I learned from the factor that you were here. I predicted that we might meet again, if you remember.”
“I remember well,” said I. “This is a small world, after all. I take it that the quest you spoke of has brought you to the north?”
“You are right, sir,” he replied. “It has led me hundreds of miles through the wilderness, from one fort to another of the Hudson Bay territory—truly a weary round of travel.”