listen!"

"For Heaven's sake, Hat! If you don't like it, why do you listen?"

"But he ought to be stopped. I am sure the poor Indian did not _try_
to fall in the river."

Chloe made a gesture of impatience. "Very well, Hat; just look up the
ordinance against swearing on Slave River, and report him to Ottawa."

"But I'm afraid! He--the Hudson Bay Company's man--told us not to
come."

Chloe straightened up with a jerk. "See here, Hat Penny! Stop your
snivelling! What do you expect from rivermen? Haven't the seven
hundred miles of water trail taught you _anything_? And, as for being
afraid--I don't care _who_ told us not to come! I'm an Elliston, and
I'll go whereever I want to go! This isn't a pleasure trip. I came up
here for a purpose. Do you think I'm going to be scared out by the
first old man that wags his head and shrugs his shoulders? Or by any
other man! Or by any swearing that I can't understand, or any that I
can, either, for that matter! Come on, they're waiting for this bale."

Chloe Elliston's presence in the far outlands was the culmination of an
ideal, spurred by dissuasion and antagonism into a determination, and
developed by longing into an obsession. Since infancy the girl had
been left much to her own devices. Environment, and the prescribed
course at an expensive school, should have made her pretty much what
other girls are, and an able satellite to her mother, who managed to
remain one of the busiest women of the Western metropolis--doing
absolutely nothing--but, doing it with _eclat_.

The girl's father, Blair Elliston, from his desk in a luxurious office
suite, presided over the destiny of the Elliston fleet of yellow-stack
tramps that poked their noses into queer ports and put to sea with
queer cargoes--cargoes that smelled sweet and spicy, with the spice of
the far South Seas. Office sailor though he was, Blair Elliston
commanded the respect of even the roughest of his polyglot crews--a
respect not wholly uncommingled with fear.

For this man was the son of old "Tiger" Elliston, founder of the fleet.
The man who, shoulder to shoulder with Brooke, the elder, put the fear
of God in the hearts of the pirates, and swept wide trade-lanes among
the islands of terror-infested Malaysia. And through Chloe Elliston's
veins coursed the blood of her world-roving ancestor. Her most
treasured possession was a blackened and scarred oil portrait of the
old sea-trader and adventurer,