The boys drew near.
“It was long ago,” David went on. “Long, long ago,” the old man repeated. “It was ’way back in the first half of the last century, for I was little more than a boy then. McLeod was factor at Fort Refuge, a remote post, situated three hundred miles or more to the northeast of Lake Superior, but now abandoned. And a successful, fair-dealing trader he was, but so stern and taciturn as to keep both his helpers and his half-civilized customers in awe of him. It was deep in the wilderness––not the wilderness as you boys know it, where a man might wander night and day without fear of wild beast or savage, but a vast, unexplored place, with dangers lurking everywhere.
“‘Grey,’ he said to me when I reported for duty, fresh from headquarters, ‘if you do your duty by me, I’ll do mine by you.’
“‘I’ll try to,’ said I.
“‘When you know me better,’ said McLeod, with quiet emphasis, ‘you’ll know that I stand by my word.’
“We dealt, of course, with the Indians, who, spring and fall, brought their furs to the fort, and never failed to remain until they had wasted their earnings in the fashion that best pleased their fancy.
“Even then the Indians were degenerate, given 115 over to idleness and debauchery; but they were not so far sunk in these habits as are the dull, lazy fellows who sell you the baskets and beaded moccasins that the squaws make to-day. They were superstitious, malicious, revengeful, and they were almost in a condition of savagery, for the only law they knew was the law our guns enforced. Some authority was vested in the factor, and he was not slow to exert it when a flagrant offense was committed near by.
“‘There’s no band of Indians in these parts,’ I was told, ‘that can scare McLeod. He’ll see justice done for and against them as between man and man.’