He lounged about the camp the greater part of the day and even volunteered his services in the still unsuccessful attack of the flaming gas. But Colonel Howell seemed without any interest in his offers. The man was invited, however, to eat in the camp and spend the night there.
When the boys retired, Colonel Howell, the visitor, and Ewen and Miller were still smoking before the big fire. The next morning the boys slept late and when they responded to Philip’s persistent call to breakfast, they found that Chandler had eaten and gone. Colonel Howell was awaiting the boys, Ewen and Miller being already at work on the blazing well, and he seemed to have something on his mind.
“Would there be any great danger,” he began at once, addressing Norman, “in making a short flight in your airship in weather like this?”
“This isn’t bad,” volunteered Roy. “It’s only a few degrees below zero. There’s a good fall of snow for our runners and there hasn’t been any wind since the blizzard.”
“Well,” resumed Colonel Howell, almost meditatively, “it seems a shame for us to be livin’ here in what you might call luxury and folks starving all around us. Look at this,” he went on, and he led the three boys near one of the windows where a large Department of the Interior map of northern Alberta was tacked to the wall. “Here’s Fort McMurray and our camp,” he began, pointing to a black spot on the almost uncharted white, where the McMurray River emptied into the Athabasca. Then he ran his finger northward along the wide blue line indicating the tortuous course of the Athabasca past Fort McKay and the Indian settlement described as Pierre au Calumet (marked “abandoned”), past the Muskeg, the Firebag and the Moose Rivers where they found their way into the giant Athabasca between innumerable black spots designated as “tar” islands, and at last stopped suddenly at the words “Pointe aux Tremble.”
“That’s an Indian town,” went on Colonel Howell, “and it’s about as far south as you ever find the Chipewyans. It isn’t much over a hundred miles from here and Chandler says there ain’t a man left in the village. Pretty soon, he thinks, there’ll be no women and children left. Maybe he’s making a pretty black picture but he says all the men have gone over toward the lake hunting. They’ve been gone over two weeks and the camp was starving when they left.”
The colonel, with a peculiar look on his face, led the way back to the breakfast table.
“These Indians are nothing to me,” he went on at last, “and all Indians are starving pretty much all the time, but they die just the same. But somehow, with plenty of pork and flour here and this great invention here right at hand from which nobody’s benefitting, it seems to me we must be pretty hard-hearted to sit in comfort, stuffing ourselves, while little babies are dying for scraps that we’re throwing in the river. I——”
“Colonel,” exclaimed Roy at once, “you’ve said enough. Get up what you can spare and we’ll have bannocks baking in that settlement before noon.”
“I don’t want to get you into another blizzard,” began the colonel, yet his satisfaction was apparent.