"Here's confusion to the old H. B. C's! Confusion, short life, no prosperity, and death to the Hudson's Bay!" yelled the young whiskered Nor'-Wester, springing to his feet on the bench and waving a drinking-cup round his head. Some of the youthful clerks were disposed to take their cue from this fire-eater and began strumming the table and applauding; but the _Bourgeois_ frowned on forward conduct.
"Check him, Grant!" growled Cameron in disapproval.
"Sit down, bumptious babe!" said the priest, tugging the lad's coat.
"Here, you young show-off," whispered Grant, leaning across the priest, and he knocked the boy's feet from under him bringing him down to the bench with a thud.
"He needs more outdoor life, that young one! It goes to his head mighty fast," remarked Cameron. "What were you saying about your hard luck?" and he turned to the northern winterer again.
"Call that hard luck?" broke in a mountaineer, laughing as if he considered hardships a joke. "We lived a month last winter on two meals a day; soup, out of snow-shoe thongs, first course; fried skins, second go; teaspoonful shredded fish, by way of an entrée!"
The man wore a beaded buckskin suit, and his mellow intonation of words in the manner of the Indian tongue showed that he had almost lost English speech along with English customs. His recital caused no surprise.
"Been on short, rations myself," returned the northerner. "Don't like it! Isn't safe! Rips a man's nerves to the raw when Indians glare at him with hungry eyes eighteen hours out of the twenty-four."
"What was the matter?" drawled the mountaineer. "Hudson's Bay been tampering with your Indians? Now if you had a good Indian wife as I have, you could defy the beggars to turn trade away----"
"Aye, that's so," agreed the winterer, "I heard of a fellow on the Athabasca who had to marry a squaw before he could get a pair of racquets made; but that wasn't my trouble. Game was scarce."
"Game scarce on MacKenzie River?" A chorus of voices vented their surprise. To the outside world game is always scarce, reported scarce on MacKenzie River and everywhere else by the jealous fur traders; but these deceptions are not kept up among hunters fraternizing at the same banquet board.