Lords of the North

by Agnes C. Laut

"Adderly's been in Montreal since the night of the row. For the Lord's sake, boy, do you expect to find the woman by believing in that bloated bugaboo?"

"But the Citadel paper?" I persisted.

"Of course you've never been told, Rufus Gillespie," he began, choking down his impatience with the magnitude of my stupidity, "that the commissariat buys supplies from hunters?"

"That doesn't explain the big squaw's suspicions and Louis' own conduct."

"That Louis!" says my uncle. "Pah! That son of an inflated old seigneur! A fig for the buck! Not enough brains in his pate to fill a peanut!"

"But there might be enough evil in his heart to wreck a life," and that was the first argument to pierce my uncle's scepticism. The keen eyes glanced out at me as if there might be some hope for my intelligence, and he took several turns about the room.

"Hm! If you're of that mind, you'd better go out and excavate the smallpox," was his sententious conclusion. "And if it's a hoax, you'd better——" and he puckered his brows in thought.

"What?" I asked eagerly.

"Join the traders' crews and track the villains west," he answered with the promptitude of one who decides quickly and without vacillation. "O Lord! If I were only young! But to think of a man too stout and old to buckle on his own snow-shoes hankering for that life again!" And my uncle heaved a deep sigh.

Now, no one, who has not lived the wild, free life of the northern trader, can understand the strange fascinations which for the moment eclipsed in this courteous and chivalrous old gentleman's mind all thought of the poor woman, with whom my own fate was interwoven. But I, who have lived in the lonely fastnesses of the splendid freedom, know full well what surging recollections of danger and daring, of success and defeat, of action in which one faces and laughs at death, and calm in which one sounds the unutterable depths of very infinity—thronged the old trader's soul. Indeed, when he spoke, it was as if the sentence of my own life had been pronounced; and my whole being rose up to salute destiny. I take it, there is in every one some secret and cherished desire for a chosen vocation to which each looks forward with hope up to the meridian of life, and to which many look back with regret after the meridian. Of prophetic instincts and intuitions and impressions and feelings and much more of the same kind going under a different name, I say nothing, I only set down as a fact, to be explained how it may, that all the way out to the gorge, with Paul, The Mute leading for a third time, I could have sworn there would be no corpse in that snow-covered grave. For was it not written in my inner consciousness that destiny had appointed me to the wild, free life of the north? So I was not surprised when Paul Larocque's spade struck sharply on a box. Indians sleep their last sleep in the skins of the chase. Nor was I in the least amazed when that same spade pried up the lid of cached provisions instead of a coffin. Then I had ocular proof of what I knew before, that Louis in word and conduct—but chiefly in conduct, which is the way of the expert had—lied outrageously to me.