"What did you get for your furs?" he asked, when his terms had been agreed to. They named a sum which was a disgrace to the white agents, for it meant that they had bought skins which the Indians had toiled for months to get, and had brought all the way from the Saskatchewan, for a sum that would yield about five hundred per cent profit. "You see?" he whispered to his companion. "They've no idea of values, poor chaps; a few dollars seem a gold-mine to them; and then, when a man comes along and offers an honest price without any bating, ten to one he'll be robbed and murdered because they think he's a millionaire." But the day was rapidly coming when unscrupulous persons could no longer defraud the savages; writing only ten years later, an English traveller deplores the extortionate charges made by the redskins for even the most trifling service, and points out that he could have bought furs in Regent Street as cheaply as they would sell them to any private individual. The two travellers paid their money, of course prepared to add liberally to it at the journey's end, and their boat was pointed out to them. The canoes were most of them very large, and capable of seating a crew and a family. The one assigned to the white strangers was manned by a chief and five braves; the other men, with their wives and children, distributing themselves pretty equally between the remaining canoes. "How will they get these down? Or are they going to leave them?" asked Colton, pointing to the huts, or lodges, as Barnes called them. "Get them down? You might as well talk about taking home empty wine-bottles and lobster claws after a picnic. They may take the matting, but I doubt it. They can make and erect a hut in less than an hour." Hitherto the only Indian dwellings they had passed had been huts, or else the well-known wigwams made of grass-cloth, or coarse linen; but these "lodges" were very different. They were nearly dome-shaped; more strictly, they were octagonal with a convex roof, and were constructed by eight long, slender rods of some flexible wood being stuck in the ground at equal distances; the tops were bent down till they met or overlapped, and then bound securely together with vegetable fibre. Lengths of bark, cut from the paper birch, were tied over these to form a roof; and the sides were made, in some cases by hanging strips of matting from pole to pole, but more commonly by erecting thatch walls, speedily improvised with fibre and bundles of wild rice stalks, which grew like rushes in the shallows. No attempt was made to remove them, and they were left to the next comer--an altruistic practice which had its reward; for other wandering Indians had done the same thing higher up the lake, and more often than not, when the flotilla stopped for the night, there was a camp of ready-made tents awaiting the travellers.