shall I begin?" said the chief trader, gazing into the
fire. "At what point?"

"Maren," said McElroy eagerly, from the bed; "begin with her."

Ridgar shook his head.

"Nay, it goes farther back. Let it begin with the leaving of De Seviere
and the coldness of my bearing to you.... Did you never think, lad, that
it was but a blind, covering the determination to help you at the first
opportunity? Thought you the friendship of years so poor a thing as to
be turned in a day? Day by day my heart ached for some word with you,
or even a glance that would make all straight; but those painted devils
watched my every move, my every look, the very intaking of my breath,
as the coyote watches the gopher-hole when the badger is below. Only for
sake of the dead chief at my feet was I given such seemingly free leave
among them,--for myself, I had been shipped as were poor De Courtenay's
Nor'westers at Wenusk Creek. And now is the time when I must go farther
back and tell you of the good chief who was my father, indeed, at
heart."

Ridgar paused a moment, and his eyes took on a look of distant things

"Have you not wondered how it was, lad, that a man should live long as I
have lived in the wilderness, alone, without ties other than those which
bind him to the Great Company, without love of woman, without the joy
of children?... I have not always lived so. Time was when I had my own
wickiup, when I lay by my own night-fire and played with the braids of a
woman's hair,--long black braids, bound with crimson silk and heavy with
ornaments, for whose buying I paid my year's catch, when I looked into
eyes black as the woods at night and dumb with the great love she could
not speak.... She lived it one day ... nay, died it--when I had some
words with a young man of the tribe, who drew a spear before I knew what
he meant and hurled it at me. She...leaped between. God!"

He ceased again, and McElroy could hear his breathing, see the whitened
knuckles of his hands grasping the poker from the hearth where he had
absently stirred the leaping fire.

"It went quite through her,--a foot beyond her swelling breast, full for
my only child, unborn.... She was Negansahima's daughter.... We mourned
together, the old chief and I, and our hearts were bound close as the
tree and its bark. In a far high hill of the Pays d'en Haut we put her
to sleep with that last look of love on her dark face...and we made a
pact to lie beside her when our time shoul