What a fool he had been!
Once more had he played like an unbalanced boy at the game of love.
What right had he to strike De Courtenay for kissing the woman whom he
had won with his red flowers and his curls before the populace? That he
himself had fancied for a brief space that she was his was no excuse
for plunging like a boy at his rival's throat. If he had held his
peace, all would be well now and the old chief would not be lying stiff
and stark somewhere in the shadowed camp, the women wailing without
fires.
It was no balm to his sore heart that he in his blundering wrath had
wrought this fresh disaster. And his post, De Seviere, which he had won
by daring service and loyalty to the H. B. C., what would become of it?
Who after him would rule on the Assiniboine?
For well he knew that death, and death thrice,--aye, a million times
refined,--awaited so luckless a victim as he whose hand had killed the
great chief. But he had not killed Negansahima. It was the gun in De
Courtenay's hand. Ah, De Courtenay! Where was De Courtenay? A captive
assuredly, if he was one. They had both gone down together under the
foam of that angry human sea.
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