Early on the morning of October the 11th, Robertson's valet roused him from bed with word that a man had been accidentally shot. Slipping a pistol in his pocket and all unsuspicious of trickery, Robertson dashed out. It happened that the most of his men were at a slight distance from his fort. Before they could rally to his rescue he was knocked down, disarmed, surrounded by the Nor'westers, thrown into a boat, and carried back to their fort a captive. In vain he stormed almost apoplectic with rage, and tried to send back Indian messengers to his men. The Nor'westers laughed at him good-naturedly and relegated him to quarters in one room of a log hut, where sole furnishings were a berth bed and a fireplace without a floor. Robertson's only possessions in captivity were the clothes on his back, a jackknife, a small pencil, and a notebook; but he probably consoled himself that his men were now on guard, and, outnumbering the Nor'westers two to one, could hold the ground for the Hudson's Bay that winter. As {403} time passed the captive Robertson began to wrack his brains how to communicate with his men. It was a drinking age; and the fur traders had the reputation of capacity to drink any other class of men off their legs. Robertson feigned an unholy thirst. Rapping for his guard, he requested that messengers might be sent across to the Hudson's Bay fort for a keg of liquor. It can be guessed how readily the Nor'westers complied; but Robertson took good care, when the guard was absent and the door locked, to pour out most of the whisky on the earth floor. Then taking slips of paper from his notebook, he cut them in strips the width of a spool. On these he wrote cipher and mysterious instructions, which only his men could understand, giving full information of the Nor'westers' movements, bidding his people hold their own, and ordering them to send messages down to the new Hudson's Bay governor at Red River,--William Williams,--to place his De Meuron soldiers in ambush along the Grand Rapids of the Saskatchewan to catch the Northwest partners on their way to Montreal the next spring. These slips of paper he rolled up tight as a spool and hammered into the bunghole of the barrel. Then he plastered clay over all to hide the paper, and bade the guard carry this keg of whisky back to the H.B.C. fort; it was musty, Robertson complained; let the men rinse out the keg and put in a fresh supply! All that winter Robertson, the Hudson's Bay man, captive in the Nor'westers' fort, sent weekly commands to his men by means of the whisky kegs; but in the spring his trick was discovered, and the angry Nor'westers decided he was too clever a man to be kept on the field. They would ship him out of the country when their furs were sent east.