Menard suddenly sprang forward and snatched the hatchet from the Indian's belt. It was a surprise, and the struggle was brief. Tegakwita was thrown a step backward. He hesitated between struggling for the hatchet and striking with the musket; before he had fully recovered and dropped the musket, Menard had leaped back and stood facing him with the hatchet in his right hand. "Now I will go with you to the city of the dead, Tegakwita." The Indian's breath was coming quickly, and he stood with clenched fists, taken aback by the Captain's quickness. "Come, I am ready. Pick up your musket." As Tegakwita stooped, Menard glanced toward the hut. The priest lay asleep before the door. It was better to get this madman away than to leave him free to prowl about the hut. CHAPTER XV. THE BAD DOCTOR. At the edge of the thicket they stopped and stood face to face, each waiting for the other to pass ahead. Tegakwita slightly bowed, with an unconscious imitation of the Frenchmen he had seen at Fort Frontenac and Montreal. "Pass on," said Menard, sternly. "You know the trail, Tegakwita; I do not. It is you who must lead the way." The Indian was sullen, but he yielded, plunging forward between the bushes, and now and then, in the shadow of some tree, glancing furtively over his shoulder. His manner, the suspicion that showed plainly in the nervous movements of his head, in every motion as he glided through thicket, glade, or strip of forest, told Menard that he had chosen well to take the second place. His fingers closed firmly about the handle of the hatchet. That he could throw at twenty paces to the centre of a sapling, no one knew better than Tegakwita. The city of the dead lay in a hollow at ten minutes' walk from the village. Generations ago the trees had been cleared, and no bush or sapling had been allowed a foothold on this ground. The elms and oaks and maples threw their shadows across the broad circle, and each breath of wind set them dancing over the mounds where many an hundred skeletons crouched side by side, under the grass-grown heaps of earth, their rusted knives and hatchets and their mouldy blankets by their sides. No man came here, save when a new heap of yellow earth lay fresh-turned in the sun, and a long line of dancing, wailing redmen, led by their howling doctors, followed some body that had come to claim its seat among the skeletons. Tegakwita paused at the edge of the clearing, and looked around with that furtive quickness. Menard came slowly to his side. "You will take your weapons to the grave?" asked Menard, very quietly, but with a suggestion that the other understood. "Yes. Tegakwita has no place for his weapons. He must carry them where he goes."