The Gun-Brand

by James B. Hendryx

"Ye'll tak' charge here the noo, laddie?" asked McTurk, the grizzled chief trader, the following day when MacNair had concluded the inspection of his father's papers. "'Twad be what he'd ha' counselled!"

"No," answered the young man shortly, and, without a word as to the finding of the lost mine, hurried Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack into a canoe and headed southward.

A month later the officers of the Hudson Bay Company in Winnipeg gasped in surprise at the offer of young MacNair to trade the broad acres to which his father had acquired title in the wheat belt of Saskatchewan and Alberta for a vast tract of barren ground in the subarctic. They traded gladly, and when the young man heard that his dicker had earned for him the name of Fool MacNair in the conclave of the mighty, he smiled—and bought more barrens.

All of which had happened eight years before Chloe Elliston defied him among the stumps of her clearing, and in the interim much had transpired. In the heart of his barrens he built a post and collected about him a band of Indians who soon learned that those who worked in the mines had a far greater number of brass tokens of "made beaver" to their credit than those who trapped fur.

Those were hard years for Bob MacNair; years in which he worked day and night with his Indians, and paid them, for the most part, in promises. But always he fed them and clothed them and their women and children, although to do so stretched his credit to the limit—raised the limit—and raised it again.

He uncovered vast deposits of copper, only to realize that, until he could devise a cheaper method of transportation, the metal might as well have remained where the forgotten miners had left it. And it was while he was at work upon his transportation problem that the shovels of his Indians began to throw out golden grains from the bed of a buried creek.

When the news of gold reached the river, there was a stampede. But MacNair owned the land and his Indians were armed. There was a short, sharp battle, and the stampeders returned to the rivers to nurse their grievance and curse Brute MacNair.

He paid his debt to the Company and settled with his Indians, who suddenly found themselves rich. And then Bob MacNair learned a lesson which he never forgot—his Indians could not stand prosperity. Most of those who had stood by him all through the lean years when he had provided them only a bare existence, took their newly acquired wealth and departed for the white man's country. Some returned—broken husks of the men who departed. Many would never return, and for their undoing MacNair reproached himself unsparingly, the while he devised an economic system of his own, and mined his gold and worked out his transportation problem upon a more elaborate scale. The harm had been done, however; his Indians were known to be rich, and MacNair found his colony had become the cynosure of the eyes of the whiskey-runners, the chiefest among whom was Pierre Lapierre. It was among these men that the name of Brute, first used by the beaten stampeders, came into general use—a fitting name, from their viewpoint—for when one of them chanced to fall into his hands, his moments became at once fraught with tribulation.

And so MacNair had become a power in the Northland, respected by the officers of the Hudson Bay Company, a friend of the Indians, and a terror to those who looked upon the red man as their natural prey.

Step by step, the events that had been the milestones of this man's life recurred to his mind as he tramped tirelessly through the scrub growth of the barrens toward a spot upon the shore of the lake—the only grass plot within a radius of five hundred miles. Throwing himself down beside a low, sodded mound in the centre of the plot, he idly watched the great flocks of water fowls disport themselves upon the surface of the lake.