As the agent of the government entrusted with the dispensation of the financial and commercial gifts to the Indians, in accordance with the secret treaty with President Washington, no one ever knew how much, or how little, the poor red men ever received. The fact that the arrangement was a secret one, was much to the purpose and pleasure of McGillivray. The government promptly met its obligation, and there is not wanting evidence that there all sense of obligation ended. This notorious man went to his grave invested with the deepest suspicion. Nor was it altogether restricted to suspicion, this outrageous conduct of Alexander McGillivray. Detection was unescapable under certain conditions. Secret agents of a suspicious government, spying out his varied transactions, exposed his atrocity time and again, but in each instance, it was found that he had so successfully woven a network of defense, that to undertake to eliminate him by force, would have been like tearing a new patch from an old garment, according to the sacred parable, the rent of which would have been made the worse thereby. The government sought by indirection and not always in the most creditable way, to uproot the confidence of the Indians by due exposure, but McGillivray was never found unprovided with means to account for the reasonableness of each separate charge. With the strategy of a Napoleon, this extraordinary man could outgeneral all who were pitted against him. Such was the character, such the career of Alexander McGillivray. He was now an old man. The stylus of care and of responsibility, assumed in an arena the most atrocious, had drawn deep grooves on his brow. His silver hair and tottering gait admonished him of the brief time that was his, but so far from relaxing his grip on the things which had actuated him throughout, this condition only served to tighten it. Experience had sharpened his wits, and villainy had made him impregnable in plying his art. His was a master passion that gave fresh desperateness in view of the approaching end. A vast fortune was his, and with the passion of the man who never had a higher dream than that of personal gain, he hugged it with a tenacity common to men under conditions of advancing age, yet knowing meanwhile, that with his end would come that of the use of his immense means. He lived to see himself repudiated by all alike. He was rejected by the American government, cast out by the Spaniards, and, by degrees, came to be distrusted even by the Indians. All sense of remorse was gone, all the finer emotions which shrink from public exposure of wrong, long ago deadened. Moral obliquity was complete, and hardened iniquity made him insensible to the frown of reproach with which he was everywhere met.