Just for a moment the man hesitated. He glanced back at the bed as though regretful at being dragged from his torture of the defenceless woman lying there. Then with a shrug, he moved across the room, and, thrusting the squaw aside, hurried out to meet his unexpected visitor.
It was an utterly different man who shook the visitor by the hand. Nicol was smiling with a pleasant amiability. And no man could better express cordiality than he.
"It's 'Tough' Alroy," he said, as though that individual were the only person in the world he wanted to see. "Well, well," he went on heartily. "My head's just bursting with pleasure and surprise. Say, I often remember the days—and nights—in Seal Bay. Gee! This brings back times, eh? Is it just a trip or?——"
"Business."
The man grinned. He was more than well named. His black eyes were full of good-humoured deviltry. He was a type, in his picturesque buckskin, familiar enough among the trail men of the Northland. Tough, as his nickname suggested, hard, unscrupulous, ready for anything that the gods of fortune passed down to him, nothing concerned, nothing mattered so that he gathered enough for a red time at his journey's end.
"Business?"
"Yep. Lorson Harris. It's big. Guess I've a brief along with me that's to be set right into your hands, an' when you've eaten the stuff wrote ther', why, you need to light a pipe with it, an' see ther's none left over. I've been takin' a hand up to now. But ther's reasons why I've cut out. It's for you now. Can we parley?"
The trader's cordiality had become absorbed in a deeply serious regard. He was guessing hard. Lorson Harris was the one man in the world whom he seriously feared. He knew he was bound to him by chains which galled every time he strained against them. The great trader's tentacles were spread out over the length and breadth of the Northland. There was no escape from them. He had said a few moments before that here, at Fort Duggan, they were a thousand miles from anywhere. But then he was thinking of something quite different. So long as he lived in the Northland he knew he was within immediate reach of Lorson Harris. What was this message from Lorson Harris? What did it portend?
He abruptly turned and indicated the broad sill of the door of the main fort building.