ntleman. He has been very kind to me--very considerate. He is only
a quarter-Indian. Many of the very best families have Indian blood in
their veins--even boast of it. I--I'm a _fool_!" she exclaimed, and
passed quickly into the house.

Pierre Lapierre was a man, able, shrewd, unscrupulous. The son of a
French factor of the Hudson Bay Company and his half-breed wife, he was
sent early to school, where he remained to complete his college course;
for it was the desire of his father that the son should engage in some
profession for which his education fitted him.

But the blood of the North was in his veins. The call of the North
lured him into the North, and he returned to the trading-post of his
father, where he was given a position as clerk and later appointed
trader and assigned to a post of his own far to the northward.

While the wilderness captivated and entranced him, the humdrum life of
a trader wearied him. He longed for excitement--action.

During the several years of his service with the great fur company he
assiduously studied conditions, storing up in his mind a fund of
information that later was to stand him in good stead. He studied the
trade, the Indians, the country. He studied the men of the Mounted,
and smugglers, and whiskey-runners, and free-traders. And it was in a
brush with these latter that he overstepped the bounds which, under the
changed conditions, even the agents of the great Company might not go.

Chafing under the loss of trade by reason of an independent post that
had been built upon the shore of his lake some ten miles to the
southward, his wild Metis blood called for action and, hastily
summoning a small band of Indians, he attacked the independents.
Incidentally, the free-traders' post was burned, one of the traders
killed, and the other captured and sent upon the _longue traverse_. In
some unaccountable manner, after suffering untold hardships, the man
won through to civilization and promptly had Pierre Lapierre brought to
book.

The Company stood loyally between its trader and the prison bars; but
the old order had changed in the Northland. Young Lapierre's action
was condemned and he was dismissed from the Company's service with a
payment of three years' unearned salary whereupon, he promptly turned
free-trader, and his knowledge of the methods of the H.B.C., the
Indians, and the country, made largely for success.

The life of the free-trader satisfied his longin