For eight months a prisoner in a small room, Robertson directed the men of his own fort by means of the whiskey kegs, sending word of all secrets he could learn in the enemy’s camp, checkmating every move of the Nor’Westers among the Indians. In vain, he urged his followers to sally out and rescue him. The Hudson’s Bay traders were not willing to risk another such massacre as on Red River. Immunity bred carelessness. In the month of May a Nor’Wester, spying through crevices of the logs, caught Robertson sealing up the bung in the whiskey keg. Swords and pistol in hand, the angry partners burst into the room with torrents of abuse that Robertson was quite able to return. He was too dangerous a man to keep prisoner. The Nor’Westers decided to ship him out of the country on pain of assassination if he dared to return. No doubt Robertson smiled. His own coureurs had long since been sent speeding over prairie and swamp for Red River to warn the Hudson’s Bay governor, Williams, to catch the Northwest fur brigade when the canoes would be running the rapids of the Saskatchewan in June. Of the forty Nor’Westers conducting the June brigade to Montreal, half a dozen were directors. “I was embarked with Simon McGillivray,” Robertson writes. “At Isle a la Crosse ... seeing the strong rapids before us, I threw off my cloak as was my custom when running rapids.... What was my horror when I perceived our canoe swept out of its track into a shute over the rocks.... Our steersman shouted, ‘My God, we are all lost.’... The canoe upset.... I attempted to swim ashore but the strong eddies drew me under the falls where I found Mr. Simon McGillivray and two or three others clinging to the gun’els of the canoe.... The canoe swept on down the current and Mr. Shaw, one of the partners, caught us below.” What was almost an escape through an accident evidently suggested to Robertson’s mind that it was not absolutely necessary he should be deported out of the country against his will. At Cumberland House, where the brigade camped for a night, there was a Hudson’s Bay as well as a Northwest post. Robertson asked leave to say good-by to his old friends, but no sooner was he inside the gates of the Hudson’s Bay post than bolts were shot and every man of the ten inside the palisades, armed ready to fire if the Nor’Westers approached. “I have escaped,” he writes, “but not agreeable to my feelings.... However my friends may applaud the act, my conscience tells me I have not done right in breaking my parole.... However, it is all over now.... At half past ten in the morning, the Northwest canoes pushed off from the beach without me.”