Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/152

142 form her husband of his treachery. On this the wretch attempted to force her to his wishes, but she, seizing an Indian spear which happened to stand in a corner of the room where this scene was being enacted, defended herself in such a manner and jeoparded his life to such a degree, that he was forced in self-defence to take her life.

Having performed this bloody deed, he loaded a gun, and placing himself behind the gate of the "Fort," he awaited anxiously the return of his unsuspecting master, whom, as he entered the gateway, he shot in the back, causing his immediate death. He next murdered the eldest child, a girl about six years of age, and was proceeding to finish his bloody work by taking the life of the youngest, when his black heart misgave him. The child had been his pet, and was just beginning to run about and lisp its childish prattle, and at first he could not find it within him to take its innocent life. His qualms of conscience, however, did not last long, for becoming tired of its ceaseless cries for its parents, after he had preserved its life three days, he murdered the little one in cold blood, and made its grave with his other victims in a heap of shavings and other rubbish, which had accumulated in a corner of the Fort.

This bloody tragedy was perpetrated in the spring of the year, when the Indians were all away at their sugar camps on the main shore, and at a time when the ice on the lake had become so weak and rotten as to make it unsafe to cross or travel on it. Notwithstanding the state of the ice, the guilty man, who could not bear to remain in solitude surrounded with the evidences of his bloody deed, attempted to make his escape, but having twice broken through the ice, and with difficulty saved his life, and (as he confessed) being drawn back by an invisible power, he returned to the scene of his crime, to patiently await its consequence.