tracted to a line of barely perceptible ripples at right angles to the channel, dead ahead.
"Ah-hah!" he breathed. "Nets!" and every muscle in his body stiffened.
The launch was almost on the nets when a gunner in the bow raised a shout of warning. Like a flash the Cree dropped to his knees, driving his knife into the body of the officer, as the automatic exploded. At the same instant the silence of the shore was shattered by a volley from a score of rifles in the willows. Again and again, in quick succession, the thick bush spat salvos of death on the doomed craft.
Its propeller fouled in the nets, the launch swung helpless in the current with its cargo of wounded and dead. At pointblank range of fifty yards the Cree hunters and Hudson's Bay men had wasted no shells.
Launching their hidden canoes, the company men boarded the boat, to find under the bodies of the dead officer and the helmsman the insensible form of Gaspard Laroque with a bullet-hole in the back.
They buried the dead on the beach, and with the few wounded survivors of the scouting party started for Albany. Two days later his scouts reported to MacGregor, the factor, that the morning following the ambush at Whitefish Point a large launch, after twice grounding on the flats at the river-mouth, had returned to the Elbe, which had shortly raised anchor and steamed away to the north.
It was Christmas at Fort Albany. The day previous the mail-team from Moose had arrived with im-
