“Hold up, you young fool! We must keep together,” cried the missionary, dashing after him. “Follow up, Thomas, with the dogs,” he shouted.
Not a sign of the boy could he get, but keeping the line of direction carefully he ran with all his speed, listening intently as he ran. Again there came on the storm wind the long weird call.
“More to the left,” he muttered, swinging off in that direction, but keeping up his pace. A few minutes of hard running, and through a break in the drifting storm he caught a glimpse of a huddled group of snow-sheeted spectral figures, and in the midst of them Paul holding in his arms a woman, tall and swaying in the storm like a wind-blown sapling. Clinging to the young man was a child, a little girl, and near by a boy stood, sturdily independent. Instantly the missionary took command.
“Here, Thomas!” he shouted, starting back on his tracks. Soon he met the Indian with the two dog teams, coming along at a gallop. “We have them here, Thomas. Let us make camp at the big headland. Quick! Quick!” Round the little group the Indian swung the teams.
“Get her on to the toboggan, Paul,” ordered the missionary. “We camp at the headland. Good shelter and good wood. Only hurry, for God’s sake, and follow me.”
The woman sank without a word onto one of the toboggans, the little girl upon the other, the boy scorning to ride. And rescued and rescuers made for camp.
Dazed, stupid, devoid of sensation or emotion, Paul trolled after the last toboggan, but through his head the words kept time to his feet: “He maketh the clouds His chariot; He rideth upon the wings of the wind.” And he knew that they were true.
CHAPTER XVII
Chief Factor MacKinroy himself would have been the first to assign to the missionary, the Rev. John Chambers, M.A., Oxon., the position of premier influence and even of authority, not only in the little community at the Post but in the whole district tributary to the Post, with its nondescript population of white traders and trappers, half-breeds and Indians. And this was due to those mysterious qualities that go to the making of personality, and to the services which the possession of these qualities fitted him to render. He was the titular head of the Anglican Mission, which of course gave him a standing at once influential and authoritative, but had he not been more his official position as a dignitary of a great church would have gone but a small way to win him place and power.
Fifteen years ago, raw from the greatest university in the English speaking world, he had come up with a Hudson’s Bay Company brigade and had planted himself here in this far north outpost of civilisation, to establish a mission in partibus infidelium for his church. Quite a year before his arrival, his coming had been duly announced by the company authorities in London to Factor MacKinroy, who received the announcement with explosive profanity in the “twa langiges” and then speedily forgot all about the thing.