Hardened old _roué_ as MacKenzie was--it was too much for his blackened heart. He fell on his trembling knees and according to the rites of his Catholic faith, ensured the child’s entrance to Paradise by baptism before death. It might die before he could bring water from the river. The rough old man baptized the dying infant with the blood drops from its wounds and with his own tears. Returning to the mother, he gently told her that the child had been killed. Swathing her body in cotton, these rough voyageurs bathed her wounds, put the hacked hands in splinters, and in all probability saved her life by binding up the loose skin to the scalp by a clean, fresh bladder. That night voyageurs and partners sat round the wounded where they lay, each man with back to a tree and musket across his knees. In the morning the wounded were laid in the bottom of the canoes. Scouts were appointed to ride on both sides of the river and keep guard. In this way, the brigade advanced all day and part of the following night, “the poor woman and men moaning all the time,” records McDonald of Garth. Coming down the Assiniboine to Souris, where the Hudson’s Bay had a fort under Mr. Pritchard, the Nor’Westers under Pierre Falçon, the rhyming minstrel of the prairie--the wounded were left here. Almost impossible to believe, Marguerite Trottier recovered sufficiently in a month to join the next brigade bound to Gibraltar (Winnipeg). Here she met her father and went home with him to Pembina. Jutras--the poltroon husband--who had left her to the raiders, she abandoned with all the burning scorn of her Indian blood. It seems after the Sioux had wreaked their worst cruelty, she simulated death, then crawled to hiding under the oilcloth of the canoe, where, lying in terror of more tortures, she vowed to the God of the white men that if her life were spared she would become a Christian. This vow she fulfilled at Pembina, and afterward married one of the prominent family of Gingras, so becoming the mother of a distinguished race. She lived to the good old age of almost a hundred. Another character almost as famous in Indian legend as Marguerite had been with Henry at Pembina and come north to Harmon on the Assiniboine. This was the scout, John Tanner, stolen by Shawnees from the family of the Rev. John Tanner on the Ohio. The boy had been picking walnuts in the woods when he was kidnapped by a marauding party, who traded him to the Ottawas of the Up Country. Tanner fell in good hands. His foster mother was chief of the Mackinaw Indians and quite capable of exercising her authority in terms of the physical. Chaboillez, the wintering partner, saw the boy at the Sault and inquiries as to who he was put the foster mother in such a fright of losing him that she hid him in the Sault cellars. Among the hunters of Pembina were Tanner and his Indian mother, and later--his Indian wife. He will come into this story at a later stage with J. Ba’tiste Lajimoniere.