Death was in the cabin, and over the cabin there stood a sapling pole, and at the end of the pole there fluttered a strip of red cotton rag--the warning flag of the plague from Athabasca to the bay.

This man, like a hundred other heroes of the North, had run up the warning before he laid himself down to die.

And that same night, in the cold light of the moon, Kazan and Gray Wolf swung northward into the country of the Fond du Lac.
There preceded them a messenger from the post on Reindeer Lake, who was passing up the warning that had come from Nelson House and the country to the southeast.
"There's smallpox on the Nelson," the messenger informed Williams, at Fond du Lac, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake.

God only knows what it is doing to the Bay Indians, but we hear it is wiping out the Chippewas between the Albany and the Churchill." He left the same day with his winded dogs.

"I'm off to carry word to the Reveillon people to the west," he explained.
Three days later, word came from Churchill that all of the company's servants and his majesty's subjects west of the bay should prepare themselves for the coming of the Red Terror.