talion stole by and leaped, like wolverines, with knife and bayonet into the German trenches before a single machine gun spat its red flash into the blackness. Then the artillery opened on the enemy's supports hurrying up the boyaux from their second line, and chaos was loosed.
Dawn broke on the Canadians anchored in their goal, but long before this the tale of how the surprise was made possible by the taking of the Prussian trench-head, single-handed, by Private Lecroix, —d Battalion, had travelled far up and down the lines.
Days later Booth told an interested group at brigade headquarters:
"When the rest of the advance party, fearing Lecroix had been wiped out, rushed the trench, they found the Indian stanching a bayonet wound in his shoulder with his good hand, and five dead Huns piled around him. Our stowaway, colonel, has paid for his passage. He saved the —d."
"And the —d, and Canada, will not forget," came the answer.
The spring mail-canoe was in from the south at Half-Way-House. Nicholson, the factor, sat in his trade-room devouring the first papers he had seen since the Christmas dog-team brought into the north the news of the great war. The tepees of Crees in for the spring trade—little as the Company now offered for fur—covered the post clearing where huskies yelped and Indian children shouted at play
