When a sentry challenged them, the
now thoroughly disillusioned breed begged piteously that
they should return to Pepin's house and set out early on
the following morning for the place where Dorothy was
imprisoned up the Saskatchewan, before that army of
soldiers, who surely swarmed like a colony of ants, was
afoot.
Pepin knew that the approach of an army would only be
the means of preventing him from finding Dorothy. He
must go to her himself. He would also, for the sake of
the proprieties, take his mother along in a Red River
cart; his mind was quite made up upon that point. If he
did not do so, who could tell that the Douglas female,
with the cunning of her sex, would not lay some awkward
trap for him? The girl had plainly said, "Come to me,"
and he was secretly elated, but his conviction of old
growth, that all women were "after" him, made him cautious.
So next morning, before break of day, the Red River cart
was packed up and at the door. Pepin and his mother got
into it, Antoine was led behind by means of a rope, and
Bastien rode alongside on a sturdy little Indian pony.
It was indeed an _outre_ and extraordinary little procession
that started out.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE INDIANS' AWAKENING
Little Running Cropped-eared Dog of the Stonies sat
smoking his red clay calumet at the narrow entrance of
the gorge that looked out upon the wooded hillside, the
only means of ingress to the shelf which constituted
Dorothy's prison-house.
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