ndians
worshipped him, and the quarter-breeds and half-breeds and occasional
French called him "_mon Pere_" in very much the same tone of voice as
they said "Our Father" in their prayers. These people of the trap-lines
were a revelation to David. They were wild, living in a savage
primitiveness, and yet they reverenced a divinity with a conviction that
amazed him. And they died. That was the tragedy of it. They died--too
easily. He understood, after a while, why a country ten times as large
as the state of Ohio had altogether a population of less than
twenty-five thousand, a fair-sized town. Their belts were drawn too
tight--men, women, and little children--their belts too tight. That was
it! Father Roland emphasized it. Too much hunger in the long, terrible
months of winter, when to keep body and soul together they trapped the
furred creatures for the hordes of luxurious barbarians in the great
cities of the earth. Just a steady, gnawing hunger all through the
winter--hunger for something besides meat, a hunger that got into the
bones, into the eyes, into arms and legs--a hunger that brought
sickness, and then death.

That winter he saw grown men and women die of measles as easily as flies
that had devoured poison. They were over at Metoosin's, sixty miles to
the west of the Chateau, when Metoosin returned to his shack with
supplies from a Post. Metoosin had taken up lynx and marten and mink
that would sell the next year in London and Paris for a thousand
dollars, and he had brought back a few small cans of vegetables at
fifty cents a can, a little flour at forty cents a pound, a bit of cheap
cloth at the price of rare silk, some tobacco and a pittance of tea, and
he was happy. A half season's work on the trap-line and his family could
have eaten it all in a week--if they had dared to eat as much as they
needed.

"And still they're always in the debt of the Posts," the Missioner said,
the lines settling deeply on his face.

And yet David could not but feel more and more deeply the thrill, the
fascination, and, in spite of its hardships, the recompense of this life
of which he had become a part. For the first time in his life he clearly
perceived the primal measurements of riches, of contentment and of
ambition, and these three things that he saw stripped naked for his eyes
many other things which he had not understood, or in blindness had
failed to see, in the life from which he had come. Metoosin, with that
little