CHAPTER XII THE RED DEATH Kazan and Gray Wolf wandered northward into the Fond du Lac country, and were there when Jacques, a Hudson Bay Company's runner, came up to the post from the south with the first authentic news of the dread plaguethe smallpox.

"There's smallpox on the Nelson," the messenger informed Williams, at Fond du Lac, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake.

"He has the smallpox, Tom.

Before that time, he had been over the mountains surveying all that western country, and then to the West Indies, where he had the smallpox, because he would not break a promise to dine with a family where it was.

"It was the smallpox which killed my father and my mother.

"What patients?" "Out at the Quarter Circle KT where that epidemic of smallpox is raging!"

"That's all a mistake," Old Heck said hastily; "we thought is was smallpox but it wasn't" "No, everybody's got over it," Skinny added nervously; "they're all cured!"

"Yes, they was just broke out with the heat and didn't have the smallpox at all" Old Heck explained.

Uncle Josiah was when he sent that telegram saying there was smallpox at the Quarter Circle KT" "Am I?"

That telegram lying about them all having the smallpox proved as much.

I've heard that his mother died when he was born and his father was a preacher or something doing missionary workI reckon that's what you'd call itamong the Mexicans and Indians and got the smallpox while he was nursing them through an epidemic and it killed him, which left th' Ramblin' Kid an orphan when he wasn't much more than a baby.

The other was puffy and flushed, with a brick-coloured complexion deeply pitted by smallpox.

" "What do you mean?" "Smallpox is in town!"

It occurred to him that his mother had passed through an attack of smallpox in her youth, and could take care of the colonel without danger.

"I regret to say, Mrs. Preston, that he has the smallpox.

" "The smallpox!" almost shrieked Mrs. Preston.

Oh, I wouldn't have the smallpox for this world!

"I never had the smallpox.

But people sometimes take the smallpox even after they have been vaccinated.

Most of them have had the smallpox.

You have the smallpox.

I don't think I am in danger, for I've had the smallpox already.

The mother, in all probability, saved me from falling a victim to smallpox.

He said that she had nursed him when he was sick with the smallpox, and he'd never forget it, and that he'd bought the house expressly for her.

He had not been three weeks at Barbadoes before he was taken down with the smallpox; and for a month he was very sick.