There was smiling confidence and assurance in the woman’s wide eyes, so dark and gentle, yet so full of the savage she really was.
“Good.” Marty Le Gros reached out his hand and patted the woman’s rounded shoulder under the elaborately beaded buckskin tunic she had never abandoned for the less serviceable raiment of the whitewoman. “Then I go.”
The missionary nodded and passed out. And the squaw stood in his place in the doorway gazing after him as he hurried down to the canoe which lay moored at the river bank.
The scene about the Fort was one of leisurely activity. The day’s work was nearly completed for all the sun was high in the heavens. The smoke of camp fires was lolling upon the still evening air, and the smell of cooking food pervaded the entire neighbourhood.
Now the store had emptied of its human, bartering freight, and with the close of the day’s trading, Jim McLeod and his young wife, like all the rest, were about to retire to their evening meal.
The man was leaning on the long counter contemplating the narrow day book in which he recorded his transactions with the Eskimo, and those other trailmen who were regular customers. His wife, Hesther, young, slight and almost pretty, was standing in the open doorway regarding the simple camp scenes going on within the walls of the great stockade which surrounded their home. She was simply clad in a waist and skirt of some rough plaid material. Her soft brown eyes were alight and smiling, and their colour closely matched the wealth of brown hair coiled neatly about her head.
“Nearly through, Jim?” she inquired after awhile.
The man at the counter looked up.
“It ain’t so bad as it’s been,” he said. “But it’s short. A hell of a piece short of what it should be.” He moved out from behind his counter and came to the woman’s side. “You know, Hes, I went into things last night. We’re three hundred seals down on the year and I’d hate to tell you the number of foxes we’re short. We’re gettin’ the left-overs. That’s it. Those darn Euralians skin the pore fools of Eskimo out of the best, an’ we get the stuff they ain’t no use for. It’s a God’s shame, gal. If it goes on ther’s jest one thing in sight. We’ll be beatin’ it back to civilization, an’ chasing up a grub stake. The company’ll shut this post right down—sure.”