Margot nodded abstractedly and deftly snipped a thread that dangled from a seam of a little sleeve. She had heard this same statement many times during the three years of their married life, and she smiled to herself as Molaire, her father, who was the Company's factor at Lashing Water, laid aside his well thumbed invoice with a snort of disgust. She knew her two men well, did Margot, and she could anticipate almost word for word the heated argument that was bound to follow. Without rising she motioned to Tom Shirts, the Company Indian,
to light the great swinging lamp. And as the yellow light flooded the long, low trading room, she resumed her sewing, while Molaire hitched his chair nearer the stove and whittled a pipeful of tobacco from a plug.
"There ye go again with ye're tomrot an' ye're foolishness!" exploded the old Frenchman, as he threw away his match and crowded the swelling tobacco back into the bowl of his pipe. "Always babblin' about the gold. Always wantin' to go an' find out for ye'reself it ain't there."
"But I'm tellin' you it is there," insisted MacFarlane.
"Where is it, then? Why ain't it be'n got?"
"Because the right man ain't gone after it."
"An' ye're the right man, I suppose! Still lackin' of twenty-five years, an' be'n four years in the bush; tellin' me that's be'n forty years in the fur country, an' older than ye before ever I seen it. Ye'll do better to ferget this foolishness an' stick to the fur like me. I've lived like a king in one post an' another—an' when I'm old I'll retire on my pension."
"An' when I'm old, if I find the gold, I'll ask pension of no man. It ain't so much for myself that I want gold—it's for them—for Margot, there, an' the wee Margot in yon." He nodded toward the door of the living room where the year-old baby lay asleep.
Molaire shrugged: "Margot has lived always in the bush. She needs no gold, an' the little one needs
no gold. Gold costs lives. Come, Margot, speak up! Would ye send ye're man to die in the barrens for the gold that ain't there?"