Launching canoes with whispers and muffling their paddles, the white men rowed all night, hid by day, and in three days were safe with the traders at the Forks, or what is now Winnipeg. Up at Athabasca, Pond, the indomitable, was setting a bad example for lawless work. Wadin was his partner; Le Sieur, his clerk. No greater test of fairness and manhood exists than to box two men in a house ten by ten in the wilderness, with no company but their own year in, year out. Pond was for doing impossibles—or what seemed impossibles at that day. He had sent two traders down Big River (the MacKenzie) as far as Slave Lake. The Indians were furiously hostile. Wadin, the Swiss partner, opposed all risks. Lonely, unstrung and ill-natured, Pond conceived that hatred for his partner which men, who have been tied too close to an alien nature, know. The men had come to blows. One night the quarrel became so hot, Le Sieur withdrew from the house. He had gone only a few steps when he heard two shots. Rushing back, he found the Swiss weltering in his blood on the floor. “Be off! Never let me see your face again,” shouted the wounded man, catching sight of Pond. Those were his last words. It is a terrible commentary on civilization that the first blood shed in the Athabasca was that of a white man slain by a white man; but the Athabasca was three thousand miles away from punishment and the merry game had only begun. Later, Pond was tried for this crime, but acquitted in Montreal. Roving Assiniboines had visited the Mandanes of the Missouri, this year. They brought back with them not only stolen horses, but an unknown, unseen horror—the germ of smallpox—which ran like a fiery scourge for three years, from Red River and the Assiniboine to the Rockies, sweeping off two-thirds of the native population. Camp after camp, tribe after tribe, was attacked and utterly destroyed, leaving no monument but a heap of bleaching bones scraped clean by the wolves. Tent leather flapped lonely to the wind, rotting on the tepee poles where Death had spared not a soul of a whole encampment. In vain the maddened Indians made offerings to their gods, slew their children to appease this Death Demon’s wrath, and cast away all their belongings. Warriors mounted their fleetest horses and rode like mad to outrace the Death they fancied was pursuing them. Delirious patients threw themselves into the lakes and rivers to assuage suffering. The epidemic was of terrible virulence. The young and middle-aged fell victims most readily, and many aged parents committed suicide rather than live on, bereft of their children. There was an end to all conspiracy for a great uprising and massacre of the whites. The whites had fled before the scourge as terrified as were the Indians and for three years there was scarcely a fur trader in the country from the Missouri to the Saskatchewan.