Behind him, well above the highest water level of the river, the staunch walls of the stockade of old Fort Cupar still sheltered the frame building which was about to be abandoned. But already the place had assumed something of the lifelessness which human desertion leaves in its wake. There were no Eskimo encampments gathered about its timbers. There were no columns of smoke arising from camp fires. The familiar yelp of trail dogs, and the shrill voices of native children were silent. There was no life anywhere but in the presence of the man on the landing, and in that of the girl clad in native buckskin standing beside him, and in the slow movements of five Indians and half-breeds who, under the guidance of the factor, were completing the stowage of cargo in the three canoes moored to the derelict landing.
It was the day of the great retreat. It was the final yielding after years of struggle. It was the giving up of that last thread of hope which is the most difficult thing in human psychology.
Old Ben Needham was more than reluctant. He was a hard-bitten fur-trader of the older school. A man of force and wide experience. A man bred to the work, acute, rough, and not too scrupulous. He had been born in the Arctic, schooled in the Arctic, and only when the needs of his trade demanded had he ever passed out of that magic circle. He was a man approaching sixty, full of an aggressive fighting spirit which usually modifies in men of advancing years. And he knew that he was about to acknowledge complete defeat after seven years of battling against invisible odds. He knew that the company had selected him out of all their army of servants to attempt the rehabilitation of the fortunes of Fort Cupar, and he had utterly and completely failed. And so, as he stood on the landing superintending the last removal of stores, and contemplating the return with his story of failure to those who had sent him on his forlorn hope, his mood was uneasy, his temper was sour and inclined to violence.
The voice of the girl beside him roused him out of his contemplation of the familiar scene.
“You need Mum here to put heart into you, Ben,” she said with a smile that masked her own feelings. “You know, Mum’s the wisest thing in a country where fools are dead certain to go under. She’d tell you there’s nothing so bad in the world as flogging a dead mule. The feller who acts that way most generally gets kicked to death by a live one. Which, I guess, is only another way of saying it’s a fool’s game anyway.”
“Does she say that, Kid?”
The man turned from the scene that had so preoccupied him, and his deep-set, hard grey eyes surveyed the speaker from beneath his bushy, snow-white brows. For all his mood there was a sort of mild tolerance in his tone.
The girl he addressed as Kid smiled blandly into his unresponsive face, and her wide blue eyes were full of girlish raillery. For all the sunburn on her rounded cheek, and the rough make of her almost mannish clothing, or perhaps because of these things, she was amazingly attractive. She was young. Something less than twenty. But she was tall, taller than the broad figure of the man beside her. And there was physical strength and vigour in her graceful girlish body.
She was clad in buckskin from her head to the reindeer moccasins on her shapely feet. Her tunic, or parka, was tricked out with beads and narrow fur trimmings in truly Indian fashion. And the leather girdle about her slim waist supported a long sheath knife, much as the native hunters were equipped. But she was white, with fair curling hair coiled in a prodigal mass under her fur cap, with wide, smiling eyes that rivalled the blue of the summer sky, and a nose as perfectly modelled, and lips as warm and ripe as any daughter of the more southern latitudes. Her manner was easy and self-reliant. It was full of that cool assurance bred of the independence which the hard life of the Northland forces upon its children. Nature had equipped her with splendid generosity, and the man understood that her sex robbed her of nothing that could make her his equal in understanding of the conditions in which their lives were cast.
The girl laughed gaily.