what the measure of the world might be,
always, deep within him would rankle the bitter disappointment--the
realization that this old man had gone to his grave believing that his
son was a fool and a wastrel.

Slowly he turned from the spot and, with heavy steps, entered the
post-store. He raised the pack that contained the samples from the
floor, and, walking to the verge of the high cliff that overlooked the
river, hurled it far out over the water, where it fell with a dull
splash that was drowned in the roar of the rapids.

"Ye'll tak' charge here the noo, laddie?" asked McTurk, the grizzled
chief trader, the following day when MacNair had concluded the
inspection of his father's papers. "'Twad be what _he'd_ ha'
counselled!"

"No," answered the young man shortly, and, without a word as to the
finding of the lost mine, hurried Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack into
a canoe and headed southward.

A month later the officers of the Hudson Bay Company in Winnipeg gasped
in surprise at the offer of young MacNair to trade the broad acres to
which his father had acquired title in the wheat belt of Saskatchewan
and Alberta for a vast tract of barren ground in the subarctic. They
traded gladly, and when the young man heard that his dicker had earned
for him the name of Fool MacNair in the conclave of the mighty, he
smiled--and bought more barrens.

All of which had happened eight years before Chloe Elliston defied him
among the stumps of her clearing, and in the interim much had
transpired. In the heart of his barrens he built a post and collected
about him a band of Indians who soon learned that those who worked in
the mines had a far greater number of brass tokens of "made beaver" to
their credit than those who trapped fur.

Those were hard years for Bob MacNair; years in which he worked day and
night with his Indians, and paid them, for the most part, in promises.
But always he fed them and clothed them and their women and children,
although to do so stretched his credit to the limit--raised the
limit--and raised it again.

He uncovered vast deposits of copper, only to realize that, until he
could devise a cheaper method of transportation, the metal might as
well have remained where the forgotten miners had left it. And it was
while he was at work upon his transportation problem that the shovels
of his Indians began to throw out golden grains from the bed of a
buried creek.

When the news of gold reached the