the Hudson Bay Company was born. And he is certainly one of the drift of the world—one of the homeless men."
"We need those men," said Tempest. "They break out the new flags of Empire, and beat the new trails. And die the old deaths when all's done. What's his name?"
Molson gave it. And thereafter Tempest had sat silent as he stood silent now, thinking of the man who had been his friend.
He had known Dick with rather unusual intimacy in the days of their raw boyhood and adolescence, and even then he had known of the inner fastness in the big, humorous, good-looking boy who flashed so swiftly from lazy indifference to a blaze of temper. An inner fastness which he never could penetrate, for all the real love they bore each other. Now, in the light of later knowledge, Tempest wondered if Dick had held that fastness, ashamed and half-afraid, knowing it for the embryo of his future life; the thing which the world was to make him.
He glanced from Dick's tattered tunic in the scow to Dick himself, treading the tracking-step with loose-swung arms and slack hips and head low. Where dried grass was slippery under heel; where branches whipped their faces, and cut-banks broke under their hands; and where the track led them hip-high in the snow-shed water, the two men passed, silent and uncomplaining. Half-breeds live this life six months in the year for perhaps eight years. Then they drop out, crippled and helpless, and the water-ways of Canada forget them, and for them the roaring hotels at the "Landings" and the jovial talk and laughter are gone by. A white man usually suffers in the lines. He is not fitted for them, and the quarter-hour rest every forty minutes does no more than give his over-strained muscles time to stiffen.
Knowing all this, Tempest spoke to Dick at the next halt; choosing his words carefully, as is needful with the man who has been one's friend.
"I fancy we'd best camp on the trail to-night," he said. "The Portage is going to be rather a long stunt for one day."
