"None better!" said Tom Lillywhite, bridling with pride.
"Are there many white men at the Crossing?" asked Garth.
"Quite a crowd," said the old man; "eight or nine at the least. There's the two traders, and Mert Haywood the farmer, and old Turner the J. P., and the priest, and the English missionary, and the school-master; that's seven. Then there's old man Mackensie but you wouldn't hardly call him a white man—smoked too deep, and squaw-ridden."
"Is that all?" said Garth, disappointed of his quest.
"Well, there's a sort of another. He doesn't regularly belong to the Crossing but he comes into the store for his goods once or twict a year. I forgot him—most everybody's forgot him now. It's Bert Mabyn."
Garth and Natalie pricked up their ears; and their hearts began to beat.
"I got good cause to know Bert Mabyn, too," continued old Tom innocently; while the other two listened still as mice, and apprehensive of disclosures to be made. "But that's all past. I don't bear him no ill-will now. He's a cur'us chap, a little teched I guess; but as pleasant a spoken and amoosin' a feller as another feller could want to have with him on the road! Want to hear about him?"
Garth looked at Natalie dubiously.
"Yes," she said boldly.
"Well, it was three years ago," began Tom Lillywhite, with the zest of the true story-teller. "The Gov'ment sent four surveyin' parties in; and I had more'n I could do freightin' from the Settlement to the different camps. It was rough haulin', you understand, over the lines they cut through the bush, straight as a string over muskeg and coulée. You couldn't load over twenty hundredweight, and sometimes you had to dump half of that, and go back for it. But right good pay, Gov'ment pay is.