ices of the biped man.

A traveler in the sub-Arctic is forced by the deadly cold of the North
into a near intimacy of living with his fellows. Jessie had more than
once taken a long sled journey with her father. On one occasion she
had slept in a filthy Indian wigwam with a dozen natives all breathing
the same foul, unventilated air. Again she had huddled up against the
dogs, with her father and two French half-breeds, to keep in her the
spark of life a blizzard's breath was trying to blow out.

On such a trip some of the common decencies of existence are dropped.
The extreme low temperature makes it impossible for one to wash either
face or hands without the skin chapping and breaking. Food at which
one would revolt under other circumstances is devoured eagerly.

Jessie was the kind of girl such a life had made her, with
modifications in the direction of fineness induced by McRae's sturdy
character, her schooling at Winnipeg, and the higher plane of the
family standard. As might have been expected, she had courage, energy,
and that quality of decisive action bred by primitive conditions.

But she had retained, too, a cleanness of spirit hardly to be looked
for in such a primeval daughter of Eve. Her imagination and her
reading had saved the girl's sweet modesty. A certain detachment made
it possible for her to ignore the squalor of the actual and see it
only as a surface triviality, to let her mind dwell in inner concepts
of goodness and beauty while bestiality crossed the path she trod.

So when she found in one of the gins a lynx savage with the pain of
bruised flesh and broken bone snapped by the jaws of the trap,
the girl did what needed to be done swiftly and with a minimum of
reluctance.

She was close to the second trap when the sound of webs slithering
along the snow brought her up short. Her first thought was that
Onistah had changed his mind and followed her, but as soon as the
snowshoer came out of the thick timber, she saw that he was not an
Indian.

He was a huge man, and he bulked larger by reason of the heavy furs
that enveloped him. His rate of travel was rapid enough, but there was
about the gait an awkward slouch that reminded her of a grizzly. Some
sullenness of temperament seemed to find expression in the fellow's
movements.

The hood of his fur was drawn well forward over the face. He wore blue
glasses, as a protection against snow-blindness apparently. Jessie
smiled, judging him a tende