river.

Chloe was seized with a strange unrest. The sight of Harriet Penny
irritated her. She stepped from the tent and filled her lungs with
great drafts of the spruce-laden night-breeze that wafted gently out of
the mysterious dark, and rippled the surface of the river until little
waves slapped softly against the shore in tiny whisperings of the
unknown--whisperings that called, and were understood by the new
awakened self within her.

She glanced toward the fires of the rivermen where the dark-skinned,
long-haired sons of the wild squatted close about the flames over which
pots boiled, grease fried, and chunks of red meat browned upon the ends
of long toasting-sticks. The girl's heart leaped with the wild freedom
of it. A sense of might and of power surged through her veins. These
men were her men--hers to command. Savages and half-savages whose work
it was to do her bidding--and who performed their work well. The night
was calling her--the vague, portentous night of the land beyond
outposts. Slowly she passed the fires, and on along the margin of the
river whose waters, black and forbidding, reached into the North.

"The unconquered North," she breathed, as she stood upon a water-lapped
boulder and gazed into the impenetrable dark. And, as she gazed,
before her mind's eye rose a vision. The scattered teepees of the
Northland, smoke-blackened, filthy, stinking with the reek of
ill-tanned skins, resolved themselves into a village beside a broad,
smooth-flowing river.

The teepees faded, and in their place appeared rows of substantial log
cabins, each with its door-yard of neatly trimmed grass, and its beds
of gay flowers. Broad streets separated the rows. The white spire of
a church loomed proudly at the end of a street. From the doorways
dark, full-bodied women smiled happily--their faces clean, and their
long, black hair caught back with artistic bands of quill embroidery,
as they called to the clean brown children who played light-heartedly
in the grassed dooryards. Tall, lean-shouldered men, whose swarthy
faces glowed with the love of their labour, toiled gladly in fields of
yellow grain, or sang and called to one another in the forest where the
ring of their axes was drowned in the crash of falling trees.

Her vision of the North--the conquered North--her North!

As Sir James Brooke and Tiger Elliston overthrew barbarism and
established in its place an island empire of civilization, so would