The half-breed closed and bolted the door, and then sat down beside the table, his thin face peering up through the sickly lamp-glow at the engineer.
"M'seur, it would be hard for you to guess where you are." Howland waited.
"If you had lived in this country long, M'seur, you would have heard of _la Maison de Mort Rouge_--the House of the Red Death, as you would call it.

That is where we are--in the dungeon room.

It is a Hudson Bay post, abandoned almost since I can remember.

When I was a child the smallpox plague came this way and killed all the people.

Nineteen years ago the red plague came again, and not one lived through it in this _Poste de Mort Rouge._ Since then it has been left to the weasels and the owls.