man at her feet was out of the picture, even as the man on the upper deck.
"I—will do what I can," said Jennifer. "It may not be much."
Then she turned from him and climbed the ladder to the upper deck, for she dared not be alone with herself just then.
The air on the upper deck was charged with life and laughter and talk, and a swift impulse of childish longing made Jennifer slide down with her head against Mrs. Carter's knee. Her own mother was very far off in Ontario, with half a continent of earth and more than a continent of knowledge between them; but the hard, rough hand that touched her forehead now and again was a mother's hand also, tender with love for an absent daughter.
The women did not speak. They sat on the surge of the man-talk that swept them this way and that through air that was strong with tobacco-smoke and that curious pride which falls on the Northmen when they speak of their own domain. For the North and the things of the North are the only world to the men bred in it. Brodribb himself had never seen the sea, and he did not want to. He had a thousand miles and a thousand added of good earth to his either hand, and the lakes he knew grew shells and seaweed and beat their wrinkled cliffs with combers from beyond horizon. And if the waters were fresh there were salt-beds and salt-springs for moose and bear and buffalo to find their comfort in.
Disconnectedly the talk ran round. Talk of the added bounty on timber wolves, bringing it to twenty dollars; of the wood-buffalo yet killed by them yearly, and Caird's belief that no bounty would induce the superstitious Indian to court ill-luck by slaying a timber-wolf before he went to the hunting. Talk of the "strong man" of the North who had just won home beyond all records by dragging a freighted scow unaided up the Pelican Rapids; of "Soft-wind-of-the-morning," the Indian girl at Great Slave Lake, who had so queered the finest trapper in her tribe that he sat without her father's lodge day and night, starving until his bones stood out for love of her; and of the increased tracking-wage and the price of silver and cross-fox skins.
Caird told of the prospectors in the tar-soaked sand
