Now what indeed could be her motive?  “Never mind, Singing Arrow,” I said experimentally.  “What is it to you, after all?”

She wriggled her head to throw me a wrathful look.  “I always win at a game,” she mumbled.

She was as hard to read as a purring cat, but that did not matter.  “We’ve not lost yet,” I said, as slowly and coolly as if I did not see the disk of the moon looking at me.  “I sent Longuant there.  I was sure that Pemaou would keep you away, and I am playing for time.  So long as the Ottawas and Hurons are squabbling with one another, Cadillac will not deliver the prisoner.  But we must get them farther away.  Singing Arrow, I have brandy in my cargo.  I have drawn off two large flasks.  Could you carry them to the other end of the camp, and send word among the braves?”

Now this was a contemptible thing to suggest; but any one who stoops, as I was letting myself do, to use a cat’s-paw to work out his ends will surely soil his fingers.  The sword is the clean weapon.  I felt that even this Indian would look at me with disdain, but she did not.  She thought a moment, then wagged her head in assent.

“But I promised Father Carheil not to drink any brandy myself,” she added defiantly, as if she feared I might protest, and I felt myself as low as the hound that I had kicked that day because it would have stolen a child’s sagamite.

“Make haste!” I cried, in a fury with myself, and with the speeding time.  “Tell the prisoner to saunter away from the door, to pass the largest fire, and then to go straight through the old maize field toward the timber.  I will be waiting there.”

“I can do it,” she vaunted, and she gathered the brandy under her blanket, and ran like a quail, while I went to my red-topped giant.

“Pierre Boudin,” I cried, with my hand on his collar, “if we get back to this place alive, you are to marry that Ottawa girl; to marry her fairly with priest and book.  Remember that.”

My man turned a complacent eye.  “If the master wishes,” he said dutifully.  Then he gave a fat chuckle.  “I promised to marry her when we came back if she would save the Englishman,—­but then I thought that we should go home the other way.”

Why try to teach decency to a barnyard brood!  I dusted my fingers free from the soil of him.  “I will marry her to you, if only to see her flout you,” I promised vengefully.  “Now to the canoes, and have your paddles ready.”  I had no smile for him, though he sought it, as I walked away.

The moon had swung free of the horizon, and cabins and trees stood out as if made of white cardboard.  The night was chilly, and as I crept along the edge of the maize field, I caught my numbed toes on the stiffened clods of earth turned up by last year’s plowing.  Yet I moved silently, and by keeping in the shadow of blackened stumps and withered maize stalks, I reached bow-shot of the commandant’s door.