Upon this shadowed area of peace came breezing from the south Sergeant Starr on his way to the far north, seeking a runaway half-breed murderer and thief. A cheery soul was the sergeant, in spite of his seventy-three inches of gaunt and grim manhood. He had left his corporal a hundred miles back, nursing, at another Hudson’s Bay Company’s Post, a frozen foot.
“Where has your man gone, Sergeant?” inquired the factor. “Have you any idea now?”
“Up the Athabasca—among the Chippewayans, I rather guess,” replied the sergeant, “and they are the very deuce too to work with. Close as clams. No use for us.”
“But you will be getting him in time, I suppose,” said the factor dubiously.
“It’s a habit we have,” said the sergeant, as if gravely announcing a demonstrated fact. “What’s new? Who is the young Apollo?” he added, nodding in the direction of Paul who was passing.
“Yon lad is one of a party rescued by Chambers from the teeth of the last blizzard, a week or so ago.”
“Chambers is at his old tricks, eh?”
“Aye. And this time he made a very fine catch whatever. Four of them, one a woman, an Indian with a blind little child——”
“What?” exclaimed Starr, arrested in his unloading operations. “A blind girl? An Indian?”
“Half-breed Scotch. Indian mother.”