The hunter laughed heartily.

“Bless your heart, lad,” he replied.  “Don’t you be troubled about the way we dealt with Garay.  I knew all the while that he would never get to the starving point, or I wouldn’t have tried it with him.  I knew by looking at him that his isn’t the fiber of which martyrs are made.  I calculated that he would give up last night or this morning.”

“Are we going to take him back with us a prisoner?”

“That’s the trouble.  As a spy, which he undoubtedly is, his life is forfeit, but we are not executioners.  For scouts and messengers such as we are he’d be a tremendous burden to take along with us.  Moreover, I think that after his long fast he’d eat all the game we could kill, and we don’t propose to spend our whole time feeding one of our enemies.”

“Call Tayoga,” said Robert.

The Onondaga came and then young Lennox said to his two comrades: 

“Are you willing to trust me in the matter of Garay, our prisoner?”

“Yes,” they replied together.

Robert went to the man, who was still immersed in his gross feeding, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Listen, Garay,” he said.  “You’re the bearer of secret and treacherous dispatches, and you’re a spy.  You must know that under all the rules of war your life is forfeit to your captors.”

Garay’s face became gray and ghastly.

“You—­you wouldn’t murder me?” he said.

“There could be no such thing as murder in your case, and we won’t take your life, either.”

The face of the intermediary recovered its lost color.

“You will spare me, then?” he exclaimed joyfully.

“In a way, yes, but we’re not going to carry you back in luxury to Albany, nor are we thinking of making you an honored member of our band.  You’ve quite a time before you.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You will soon.  You’re going back to the Chevalier de St. Luc who has little patience with failure, and you’ll find that the road to him abounds in hard traveling.  It may be, too, that the savage Tandakora will ask you some difficult questions, but if so, Monsieur Achille Garay, it will be your task to answer them, and I take it that you have a fertile mind.  In any event, you will be equipped to meet him by your journey, which will be full of variety and effort and which will strengthen and harden your mind.”

The face of Garay paled again, and he gazed at Robert in a sort of dazed fashion.  The imagination of young Lennox was alive and leaping.  He had found what seemed to him a happy solution of a knotty problem, and, as usual in such cases, his speech became fluent and golden.