nt with his bag of money, and the doctor with his bag of tools.
Finally there was the blue hat with ostrich feathers that was already
famous in the country.

Before the summer was out, news of that hat travelled all the way to
the Arctic Ocean. Any one of these passengers would have made a gala
day for Johnny Gagnon's family. To have them all at once was almost
more than they could take in.

The tracking crew was on the opposite bank. Coiling up their line and
jumping aboard, all hands poled her across. The bishop, gathering his
cassock around his waist, was the first to leap ashore.

He was a little man, radiating goodness and fun. He had round, ruddy
cheeks, looking as if the half of an apple had been glued to each side
of his face, and a spreading, crinkly brown beard.

"_Bienvenue! Bienvenue!_" Cried Johnny Gagnon with sweeping
obeisances.

"Well, Johnny, have you got a new one for me?" asked his lordship with
a twinkle.

The river bank became a scene of delightful confusion; black cassocks,
red tunics, orange ribbons, and blue ostrich feathers all mingled. The
two slender boy priests showed strange hirsute adornments. One had a
face like a round white doily with brown fringe; the other was spotted
with hair like new grass.

The agent and the doctor were ordinary looking men. They did not add
to the picturesqueness of the scene, but each carried a bag which was
charged with romance for the natives.

The two policemen were almost as young as the boy-priests, but bigger
and redder and clean-shaven. Here the eyes of the Gagnon girls
lingered longest.

The greatest sensation, naturally, was created by the blue hat. It
was the last to come ashore. It lingered on the gunwale with an
appealing turn manwards until a red arm was offered on one side, a
black arm on the other, whereupon it hopped ashore with a coy wag to
the right and to the left. It was not hard to see why the boatmen had
christened her the "chicadee-woman."

Young Joe, catching a glimpse of the face beneath, muttered
"School-marm!" impolitely.

The natives, however, made no such distinctions. To them she was just
a white woman, only the second they had ever seen. They had no means
of knowing whether they came more beautiful than this.

Miss Mackall, booted, hatted, and corseted in town, was the headliner
of the show.

The experience to one all her life lost in a crowd of women was novel
and a little intoxicating. The blue hat waggled and co