"I go very far out on Coteau to meet Sioux. Long before I get to Sioux I drink all my own liquor; drink all, trade none. Sioux know me very well, Sioux give me plenty horses; plenty things: I quite fond of Sioux." Chaumon had that holy horror of the law and its ways which every wild or semi-wild man possesses. There is nothing so terrible to the savage as the idea of imprisonment; the wilder the bird the harder he will feel the cage. The next thing to imprisonment in Chaumon's mind was a Government proclamation--a thing all the more terrible because he could not read a line of it nor comprehend what it could be about. Chaumon's face was a study when I handed him three different proclamations and one copy of "The Small-pox in Three Stages." Whether he ever reached the Coteau and his friends the Sioux I don't know, for I soon passed on my way; but if that lively bit of literature, entitled "The Small-pox in Three Stages," had as convincing an impression on the minds of the Sioux as it had upon Chaumon, that he was doing something very reprehensible indeed, if he could only find out what it was, abject terror must have been carried far over the Coteau and the authority of the law fully vindicated along the Missouri. On Sunday morning the 30th of October we reached a high bank overlooking' a deep valley through which rolled the Assineboine River. On the opposite shore, 300 feet above the current, stood a few white houses surrounded by a wooden palisade. Around, the country stretched away on all sides in magnificent expanses. This was Fort Ellice, near the junction of the Qu'Appelle and Assineboine Rivers, 230 miles west from Fort Garry. Fording the Assineboine, which rolled its masses of ice Swiftly against the shoulder and neck of my horse, we climbed the steep hill, and gained the fort. I had ridden that distance in five days and two hours. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. The Hudson Bay Company--Furs and Free Trade--Fort Ellice--Quick Travelling-Horses--Little Blackie--Touchwood Hills--A Snow-storm--The South Saskatchewan--Attempt to cross the River--Death of poor Blackie--Carlton.