I led the way over logs and under bushes, and the Englishman followed silently; silently at least as to his tongue, but his feet were garrulous.  They stepped on twigs, stumbled on slippery lichen, and shouted their passage for rods around.

“I would rather lead a buffalo in tether,” I fretted, and just as I said it he completed the sum of his blundering by catching his toe in a root and plunging head foremost to the ground.  I pulled him up by the sleeve of his skin blouse and shook him free from loam and twigs.

“Now will you stop that?” I cried.

He looked at me gravely, unabashed, but curious.  “I did not fall purposely to irritate you.  Gravity, which, I understand, operates alike on the learned and the foolish, had some share in it.  Why are you angry?”

“Why are you reckless?  You have crashed through here as careless of noise as a stag with the hounds hot behind.”

He dropped to the ground, and took one slim moccasined foot in his hand.  He looked at it soberly.  “It seems a small thing, does it not, to cause so much ill-will between us?  It has neither weight nor mental force above it, that it should make the earth tremble.  No, monsieur, you are searching for excuses for your annoyance with me.  You are annoyed all the time.  I vex you by my silence, still more by my speech.  We are to be some time together, and I do not want to be a constant canker.  Is it not possible for you to forget me, to ignore me?”

I saw he was in earnest.  “And so you really do not know what irritated me?  Are you so little of a woodsman?”

“I have never traveled through the woods.”

I gave him a dubious glance.  “Yet you were weeks with the Hurons after your capture.”

I saw him set his teeth hard as if at a memory.  “We traveled by water ways.  I was little on the shore except at night.”

A sudden picture sickened me.  The nightly camp and this slender lad with his curious air of daintiness, and the great oily Hurons lounging in the dirt and smoke.

“Were they cruel to you?” I broke out.

He shook his head.  “No,” he said, with the air of justice I had liked in him heretofore; “no, they were not cruel.  Indeed they were almost kind, in that they left me a great deal alone.  I feared from the clemency they showed me that they were reserving me for torture.”

I eyed him with some skepticism.  “It was not the Hurons, but their rivals, the Ottawas, who would have sent you to the stake,” I explained curtly.  “The Hurons—­those of the Baron’s band—­would have held you as a hostage,—­perhaps as a deputy.”

He looked up with interested eyes.  “You are playing some political game, and these tribes are your counters.  I should like to understand.”

I examined his look, but could make nothing of it.  “You will pardon me, monsieur,” I said with a shrug, “but these are troublous times, and I find it hard to believe you as ignorant as you seem.”