they have disappeared from my district?" Donald
blazed forth.

"I know everything in this country," replied Fitzpatrick, dryly.

"Then, am I under the surveillance of your spying Indians?"

"Enough!" roared the factor, at last roused from his calm. "I am
not here to be questioned. Answer me! What are you going to do?"

McTavish dropped his clenched hands with a gesture of hopeless
weariness.

"I'll swallow your insulting innuendoes, and try to dig up some
evidence to support your accusation," he said, quietly. "If I get
track of any leakage, I'll do my best to stop it. If not, you shall
learn as soon as possible."

"The leakage exists," rejoined the factor, doggedly. "Plug the
hole, or--" He paused suggestively.

"Or what?" cried the younger man, whirling upon him furiously.

"Plug the hole--that's all."

Shaking with the fury that possessed him, McTavish turned away from
his chief, and walked to a window, lest he should lose all control
of himself. But a thought came to him that restored the proud
angle of his head, and crushed his anger into nothingness.

What McTavish yet had been the fool of a narrow-minded, disgruntled
superior, and showed it by losing his temper? None. The name of
McTavish rang down the hall of the Hudson Bay Company's history
like a bugle. Three generations of them had served this fearful
master--he was the third. His father, now chief commissioner, had
served an apprenticeship of twenty years in the wilds, beginning
as a mere lad. He himself, when barely fifteen, had felt the call
in his blood, and gone out on the trail with Peter Rainy, a devoted
Indian of his father's. Peter was still with him, but now as
body-servant, and not as instructor in woodcraft.

Donald thought of these things as he looked out of the chunky,
square window into the snow-muffled courtyard. So engrossed was he
that he failed to hear the door of the room open, and the light
footfalls of Tee-ka-mee, Fitzpatrick's bowman and body-servant.
The Indian, sensing some unpleasantness in the air, went directly
to the factor, and handed him a message, explaining that Pierre
Cardepie, one of McTavish's companions at the Dickey River post,
had sent it by Indian runner.

Through the window the post-captain saw opposite him a corner made
by two walls meeting at right angles. Even in summer, they were
stout, heavy walls; but, now, with twenty feet of snow muffling
and locking them in an unshakable grip, they were monstr