trader with a boat-load of furs which he is
going to take out over the Rat Portage and into the Yukon, the same
way that we are going," volunteered John, also after a little. "I've
been down talking with him. He says it will take ten days from here to
the summit, the best we can do, and as to when we can start no one can
tell. Uncle Dick told me we would have to wait for our supplies until
the general annual jamboree cooled down a little bit. Then we will get
our canoe off the boat and rig her up."

Jesse stood with his hands in his pockets, looking about the motley
scene surrounding them. "I don't care much for the fur trade," said
he, slowly, after a time. "It looks all dirty, and it's a cruel thing.
I don't like to trap things, anyhow, very much any more since I got
older. Besides, it doesn't look nice to me. These people are so poor
they can barely live from one year to the next, and the Company could
have changed that in a hundred years if it had wanted to."

"Well, there's the mission-work among them even here," commented Rob.
"That gives them a little bit more life. They learn how to read a
little bit sometimes, and they get to using the needle better than
they did before. It helps them make things they can sell--moccasins
and bead-work--don't you think?"

"Huh!" said Jesse. "Much money they get out of that. When that boat's
gone their market's gone for the full year, isn't it? No, I don't like
it. Of course I'm glad we've come up here and seen all this--I
wouldn't have missed it for the world. But now I know more about the
great fur companies than I ever did before. Old ones or new ones, they
all look alike to me, and I don't like them."

"Well," said Rob, "if everything was just the way we left it back
home, there wouldn't be any fun in going traveling anywhere in the
world. It's the strangeness of this and the wildness that make it
interesting, isn't it?

"And we _are_ in a strange, wild country," he continued. "Where else
can you go in all the world and find as many new and out-of-the-way
places as this? From where we stand here you can go over east into a
country that no white man knows about. We have passed beyond the place
where Sir John Franklin was lost. If you go southwest you can get to
Dawson, maybe--there's the tombstones of the four Mounted Policemen
who tried to get across from Dawson and didn't. I've got a photograph
of their tombstones; the men just hauled them up the hill with dogs
to-day