week of continuous prayer, he had fastened on his snowshoes, and gone out upon the ice to seek God's sign. He had not travelled far before he had come to the mound where his six companions lay buried. There against the dusky sky-line he had seen a famished wolf standing over a scooped-out grave. So the factor had had his sign, and had looked upon his disembodied soul with his own eyes.

When the ice broke up and the first canoe of half-breed voyageurs swept up to the fort, they had been met by a man who crawled upon hands and knees, and snarled like a husky or a coyote.

Granger shrugged his shoulders and shuddered. He thanked his God that the spring was near by. Upon one thing he was determined, that whatever happened, though he should have to die—by his own hand, he would not grovel into Eternity upon his hands and knees as had that factor of the Hudson Bay.

For relief from the turbulence of his thoughts he turned his attention to the frozen quiet of the world without. Not a feature in the landscape had changed throughout all the past five months. He had nothing new to learn about it: he had even committed to memory where each separate shadow would fall at each particular hour of the day. Straight out of the west the river ran so far as eye could reach, until it came to Murder Point. At close of day it seemed a molten pathway which led, without a waver, from Granger's store directly to the heart of the sun. Having arrived at the Point, the Last Chance River swept round to the northeast, and then to the north, until in many curves it poured its waters into the distant Hudson Bay. Its banks, in the open season, which lasted from May to October, were low and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch. The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the closeness of its underbrush. There were places within three miles of Murder Point where a white man had never travelled, and some where not even the Indians could penetrate. Partly for this reason the district was rich in game: the caribou, moose, lynx, bear, wolf, beaver,— wolverine, and all the smaller fur-bearing animals of the North abounded there. Seventy miles to the southwestward lay the nearest point of white habitation, where stood the Hudson Bay Company's Fort of God's Voice. Between Murder Point and the coast, for two hundred and fifty miles, there was no white settlement until the river's mouth was reached, where the Company's House of the Crooked Creek had been erected on the shores of the Bay. With his nearest neighbours, seventy miles distant at God's Voice, Granger had no intercourse, for he was regarded by them as an outcast inasmuch as he was an independent trader. Once was the time when Prince Rupert's Company of Adventurers of England trading in the Hudson's Bay had held the monopoly of the fur trade over all this territory, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Coast; then to have been caught trapping or trading privately had meant almost certain death to the trespasser. Now that the powers of the Company had been curtailed, the only manner in which a Hudson Bay factor could show his displeasure toward the interloper was by ignoring his presence—a very real penalty in a land of loneliness, where, at the best, men can only hope to meet once or twice a year—and by rendering his existence as unbearable and silent as possible in every lawful and private way. In the art of ostracising, Robert Pilgrim, the factor at God's Voice, was a past master; during the two and a half years that Granger had been in Keewatin he had had direct communication with no one of the Company's white employees. On occasions certain of its Cree Indians and half-breed trappers had come to him stealthily, at dead of night, to see whether he would not offer them better terms for their season's catch of furs, or to inquire whether he would not give them liquor in exchange, the selling of which to an Indian in Keewatin is a punishable offence. These were usually loose characters who, being heavily in debt to the Company, were trying to postpone payment by selling to Granger on the sly; yet, even these men, when day had dawned, would pass him on the river without recognition, as if he were a stick or a block of ice. However, only by dealing with such renegades could he hope to pick up any profit for the proprietors of his store. His every gain was a loss to the factor, and vice versa; therefore by Robert Pilgrim he was not greatly beloved.

Pilgrim was a man of conservative principles, who looked back with longing to the days when a factor was supreme in his own domain, holding discretionary powers over all his people's lives, who, after the giving of a third warning to an independent trader found poaching in his district, could dispose of him more or less barbarously according to his choice. Now that every man, whatever his company, had an equal right to gather furs in the Canadian North, he considered that he and his employers were being robbed; wherefore he made it his business to see that no friendship existed between any of his subordinates and the man at Murder Point. Hence it happened that in summer when the canoes and York boats, and in winter when the dog-teams and runners from God's Voice, went up and down river by the free-trading store of Garnier, Parwin and Wrath, no head was turned, and no sign given that anyone was aware that a white man, yearning for a handshake and the sound of spoken words, was regarding them with sorrowful eyes from the wind-swept spit of land.

Two years and a half ago, on his first arrival, Granger had laughed at the factor's petty persecution and had pretended not to mind. Since then, as his isolation had grown on him, his temper had changed, his pride had given way, until, in the January of the present year, he had journeyed down to the Company's fort, and had implored them to speak to him, if only to curse him, that his reason might be saved. The gates of the fort had been clanged in his face, and he had been silently threatened with a loaded rifle, till resurrected shame had driven him away.

He had since heard that Pilgrim had said on that occasion, "I knew that he would come and that this would happen sooner or later. I've been waiting for it; but he's held out longer than the last one."

This remark explained to Granger how it was that, when he had arrived in Winnipeg, having just returned from the Klondike, and had applied to his acquaintance Wrath for employment, his request had been so readily granted. He had marvelled at the time that he, who had had next to no experience in Indian trading, should have met with immediate engagement, and have been given sole charge of an outpost. Now he knew the reason; he had been given his job because his employers could get no one else to take it. From the first day of his coming to Murder Point strange stories had reached his ears concerning the diverse and sudden ways in which its bygone agents had departed this life: some by committing murder against themselves; some by committing murder against others; some, having gone mad, by wandering off into the winter wilderness to die; others, who were reckoned sane, by attempting to make the six hundred and eighty mile journey back to civilisation alone across the snow and ice. These rumours he had not credited at first, supposing them to be fictions invented by Pilgrim for the purpose of shattering his confidence, and thus inducing him to leave at once. The last remark of the factor, however, inasmuch as it had been reported to him by an honest man, the Jesuit priest Père Antoine, had proved to him that they were not all lies. When he had