To do him justice, though the Indian may be treacherous, he is seldom a liar; consequently he is less prone than the rest of the world to doubt another man's word. From the chief's increasing hesitation it was clear enough that he believed the Englishman's statement, and was not unwilling to be friendly. All the same, Lord's mind was not entirely at ease; none of the Indians had horses; few of them had firearms; and the covetous glances cast at his horse and his rifle showed plainly enough that at least the majority of his new neighbours would like the opportunity of robbing him and his men. Some of them began to consult in low tones, but he turned on these with a sudden severity, partly assumed and partly real. "What?" he shouted. "Do you make a stranger of _me_? Do you exclude from your palaver one who speaks your tongue; who has smoked the peace-pipe and hunted with your brethren everywhere, from the Nipigon Lake to these very mountains, and from the white man's gold-camps to the country of the Apaches and the Navajos; who has taught even the wisest of your tribe; who can charm away pains in the jaws, and can put new life into horses and dogs and cattle when they are sick?" The muttered conversation broke off abruptly, and, with some approach to deference, the chief explained that it only related to the price which they should ask for guiding the Big White Chief, and to the doubts that some of them had as to the good faith of his followers. The Big White Chief (he stood six feet four) answered curtly that he would be answerable for his men, and, by way of payment, would give a supply of tobacco and rum to each Indian, and a revolver, with fifty cartridges, to the leader. The last item clinched the bargain in a moment, and the chief at once agreed to show the way to a gorge through which the travellers and their beasts could pass with ease to the other side. This, he said, was more than a day's journey away; if the white braves would stay the night at his camp, which they would reach by sundown, he would undertake to bring them to the gorge by noon on the following day. "Go on, then," said the Englishman. "I will inform my men and we will follow you"; and in a very few words he explained the situation to the Canadians, warning everyone to be on his guard. The Indians, though laden with the spoils of a brief hunting expedition, set off at a rapid jog-trot, seeming quite heedless of the broken and ever-rising ground, over which the white men's horses had much ado to keep pace with them. At times this difficult road gave place to a winding but well-worn track that seemed as though it would eventually lead, corkscrew fashion, to the summit of a mountain nearly ten thousand feet high.