All unmindful of him and his occupations, the other inmates of the house lay sleeping, stretched in a line, on the couch of cane that ran along the red clay walls of the circular room, behind the row of pillars which upheld the conical roof. Even the heads were covered with the wolfskins and bearskins that formed the drapery of their elastic cane mattresses. All unmindful of him they were--all except Moy Toy. The fire would flare up now and again, showing the colonnade of pillars, the cane couch, and above, the circular wall of the rich red hue of the clay of that country, with here and there upon it quaint hieroglyphics in parti-colored paints, or a decorated buffalo hide suspended, or a curiously carven pipe of stone with some famous scalp attached, while the scroll-like thin blue smoke eddied overhead, pressing closer and closer to its exit at the smoke hole. All gradually flickered and dulled and blurred into a dusky red glow in which naught was distinguishable but vague reminiscent shadows, the mass of smouldering coals in the centre of the floor, and the spirited blond Gallic face of Laroche with his incongruous Indian garb, bending intent, eager, absorbed, above the page as he wrote. Not till the page also grew dim would he rouse himself and throw off the gathering ashes. Then as the responsive flame leaped up white and vivid, he would look back along the paper to review the last paragraphs, and with a freshened brightness of aspect apply himself anew to his task. Moy Toy’s keen eye had grown to distinguish a certain difference of expression when the military expert wrought upon the problems of his enterprise,--the alert, elevated look, puzzled now and then, but intellectual, powerful, confident, and in contrast the twinkling eye, the sarcastic curving lip, the sly, devil-may-care, gibing nod, and yet sometimes the plaintive dejection with which he made those “black marks” which he sent away to his correspondents in the southern forts. “You are my friend, the friend of my heart, and you know everything,” Moy Toy once said suddenly out of the dreary midnight, when the dizzy rain was whirling abroad in a witch’s dance with the wind, the mountains were lost in the density of night, and the river had become but a voice in the vast voids of the outer atmosphere.