The Nor’Westers had kept as a deadly secret from the Indians all knowledge of the fact they had been beaten by Lord Selkirk. Robertson’s next letter tells how the secret leaked out in Athabasca. Amidst the uproarious carousals of the Nor’Westers at Chippewyan, the Hudson’s Bay captives were brought to the mess room to be the butt of drunken jokes. On one occasion, Norman McLeod bawled out a song in celebration of the massacre of settlers at Red River, of which each verse ended in this couplet: “The H. B. C. came up a hill, and up a hill they came, The H. B. C. came _up_ the hill, but _down_ they went again!” Roars of laughter were making the rafters ring when it suddenly struck one of the Hudson’s Bay prisoners that the brutal jeer might be paid back in kind. “Y’ hae niver asked me for a song,” says the canny Hudson’s Bay McFarlane to his Nor’West tormentor. “If agreeable, I hae a varse o’ me ain compaesin’.” “Silence, gentlemen,” roars McLeod to the drunken roomful of partners and clerks and Indians. “Silence! Mr. McFarlane, your song.” Remembering that the power of the Northwest Company with the Indians depended on the frightened savages being kept ignorant of Lord Selkirk’s victories, the Hudson’s Bay man’s thin voice piped up these words to the same tune: “But Selkirk brave went up a hill, and to Fort William came, When in he popped--and out from thence--could not be driven--a-g-a-i-n!” Before the last words had died in the appalling silence that fell on the rowdies, or the Indians could quite grasp what the song meant, McLeod had jumped from his chair yelling: “I’ll give you a hundred guineas if you’ll tell the name of the man who brought news of that here.” But McFarlane had no wish to see some faithful coureur’s back ripped open with the lash. “Tut-tut,” says he, “a hundred guineas for twa lines of me ain compaesin’--Extravagant, Mr. McLeod, Sir!”