And now it was my turn.  So far I had thrown fair, without twist or trickery, but I knew one turn of the wrist that could do cruel work.  Should I use it?  Pemaou had tried to murder me.  I looked at his red-and-white body, and reptile eyes, and hate rushed to my brain like liquor.  I took the spear and snapped it.

“Take your plaything!” I cried, and I tossed the fragments in his face.  “Learn to use it if you care for a whole skin, for I promise you that we shall meet again.”  And turning my back on him, I strode out of the Ottawa camp the richer by some information, and one foe.

CHAPTER V

A DECISION

I found Cadillac in his private room at the fort, and said to myself that he looked like a man stripped for running.  Not that his apparel had altered since I had met him swaggering upon the beach the day before, but his bearing had changed.  He had dropped superfluities, and was hardened and sinewed for action.

I expected him to rate me for my tardiness in reporting my interview with the Englishman, but, instead, he greeted me with so much eagerness that I saw that some of my news must have run before.

“What do you know?” I cried.

He looked at the crowd swarming outside the window.  “That we are in a hornets’ nest,” he said, with a wry smile.  “But never mind that now.  We must talk rapidly.  I have been waiting for you.  I could not act till I learned what you had done.”

I bowed my regrets.  “I was delayed.  I saw the Englishman, and”——­

He cut me short.  “Never mind the Englishman,” he cried, with a wave of his impatient hand.  “Tell me of the Ottawa camp.  You have been there an hour.  I hear that you danced where they danced, and shared dog-meat and jest alike.  In faith, Montlivet, I have a good will to keep you here in irons if I can do it in no gentler way.  But what did Longuant say at the council fire?”

I made sure that we were alone, and dropped into a chair.  My muscles were complaining, yet I knew that I had but begun my day’s work.  “It was a long council,” I said, “and all the old men were there.  Longuant was leader, but he was but one of many.  The Ottawas are much stirred.”

“About the prisoner?”

I shook my head.  “The prisoner is the excuse,—­the touchstone.  The real matter goes deep.  You have not blinded these people.  They know that England and France are at war, but they know, too, that peace may be declared any day.  They know that the Baron has made an underground treaty with the English and the Iroquois, and they realize that the Iroquois may attack this place at any time with half the band of Hurons at their back.  They have no illusions as to what such an attack would mean.  They know that the French would make terms and be spared, but that the Ottawas and the loyal Hurons would be butchered.  They are far-sighted.”