out. The tentacles of greed never held him. He had no dread of the evil machinations of hell. Neither did he recognize such a thing as divine providence. His Bible that in his half-forgotten past had been fingered nightly lay upon an unused upper shelf in his council room, sepulchred in twenty years of dust.

Fallen into silent brooding, the Factor stared at the disappearing speck upon the vast water, the speck which was Running Wolf and his craft. Dunvegan had to arouse him.

"The woman and the child," he prompted. "What is to be done with them?"

Macleod wheeled. "See that she gets no canoe to leave the post," was his curt order. "She goes out with Abbé DuCerne to the nunnery at Montreal before the frost closes in."

As some fierce interpreter of high-latitude laws he pronounced the judgment, and Flora Macleod's spirit crumpled under its weight. It came suddenly—this most appalling thing that could happen to a lover of liberty. For once in her life she had no defiant retort for the man she accepted as her father. At the vision of veil, cowl, and white walls, things some people loved, her eyes dilated in horror. The woman's heart throbbed sickeningly. Her tongue refused its mission of protest. Her knees gave way, letting her slip to the ground. There she lay, sobbing, the boy clasped close in her arms.

"Don't lie there," the Factor commanded roughly. "Get that child ready for the morning mass. I'll see that it is christened and given my own name. There'll be no Fergusons among my kin."

Full of sympathy, Dunvegan raised Flora Macleod to her feet and urged her to go inside, but she stubbornly refused to enter the house.

"Let her stay out then," cried her father, with a fresh burst of anger. "Or let her find a better house."

"There is Basil's," ventured the chief trader.

"Aye, there is Basil's, if it suits her." Macleod shrugged his mighty shoulders in bitter unconcern.

So Bruce told her to go to Dreaulond's cabin, where he knew she would be well cared for by the courier's gentle wife. Then he turned again to the moody Factor.

"I am afraid we have lost Running Wolf's trade," he observed.

"He will come back. He fears me, as they all do. And if he goes to the Nor'westers, remember, we shall soon crush them. When they are swept out of the country, where else can the old fool trade?"

"But he may fight with them," Bruce persisted.

"Perhaps. However, they will need more than Running Wolf's aid to rout the Ancient and Honorable, the Hudson's Bay Company."