Strength, daring,
alertness, yes, and kindliness, he read in the handsome, brown, lean
face of this stranger, lit by its grey-brown hazel eyes and set off
with brown wavy hair which the absence of a cap now for the first time
revealed.
"He looks all right," Cameron said to himself. And yet when he recalled
the smile that had curled these thin lips and half closed these hazel
eyes in the cave the night before, and when he thought of that murderous
attack of his Indian companion, he found it difficult wholly to trust
the man who was at once his rescuer and his captor.
In the days of the early eighties there were weird stories floating
about through the Western country of outlaw Indian traders whose chief
stock for barter was a concoction which passed for whiskey, but the
ingredients of which were principally high wines and tobacco juice, with
a little molasses to sweeten it and a touch of blue stone to give
it bite. Men of reckless daring were these traders, resourceful and
relentless. For a bottle of their "hell-fire fluid" they would buy a
buffalo hide, a pack of beaver skins, or a cayuse from an Indian without
hesitation or remorse. With a keg or two of their deadly brew they would
approach a tribe and strip it bare of a year's catch of furs.
In the fierce fights that often followed, the Indian, poorly armed and
half dead with the poison he had drunk, would come off second best and
many a wretched native was left to burn and blister upon the plains
or among the coulees at the foothills to mark the trail of the whiskey
runners.
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