But now that
they were facing the business of their journey, his voice got soft and
gentle, as it did before the Fort, when he grappled his foes two by two
and three by three, and wrung them out. In his eyes there was the thing
which counts as many men in any soldier's sight, when he leads in battle.
As he said himself, he was made for war, like Malachi o' the Golden
Collar.
Pierre guessed that just now many of the Indians would be away for the
summer hunt, and that the Fort would perhaps be held by only a few score
of braves, who, however, would fight when they might easier play. He had
no useless compunctions about bloodshed. A human life he held to be a
trifle in the big sum of time, and that it was of little moment when a
man went, if it seemed his hour. He lived up to his creed, for he had
ever held his own life as a bird upon a housetop, which a chance stone
might drop.
He was glad afterwards that he had decided to fight, for there was one
in Fort Comfort against whom he had an old grudge--the Indian, Young Eye,
who, many years before, had been one to help in killing the good Father
Halen, the priest who dropped the water on his forehead and set the cross
on top of that, when he was at his mother's breasts. One by one the
murderers had been killed, save this man. He had wandered north, lived
on the Coppermine River for a long time, and at length had come down
among the warring tribes at the Lake of Silver Shallows.
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