fires, or working until the busy women round the pots and spits, where meat sizzled, should call them to feed. Children ran about clad in furs or in thick long-trousered or long-frocked garments from Miss Chubb's bale-room. One fat yellow-brown urchin, in a skin shirt and scanty drawers, anchored by one suspender, stood sheer in the firelight and spat at them. A hand of correction reached out of the dark, and withdrew him bodily, and after-sounds told that reproof had not stopped there. The men of the North-West Mounted Police understood that they were herewith greeted as friends.
On the Grey Wolf Reserve were chiefly Crees and Beavers who accepted the white man's protection and took Treaty payments to prove it. But there were some breeds also who had reverted to the call of the Indian blood which was in them, and it was among the latter that Job Kesikaw was rated. In the eternally-shifting crowds along the river-ways Dick and Tempest had probably seen Job more than once; but he was one of the weed-rack of earth, drifting ever.
"And I've never located him yet," said Dick to his brain, and ran his quick eye round the half-seen groups. "And fancy the description I've got from old The-Back-of-To-morrow won't help me at all."
He went over that description internally. It suggested Job as a stocky, clumsy man of middle height; bull-necked and bull-strong; sinewed like a wolf, and with the eyes of a wolf; dark as the earth where the moss grows, and cunning, and greasily fat.
There were at least ten men within sight who filled that picture, line on line. One was lacing the corded sinews through a half-made snowshoe with his heavy face intent on the crossing of each mesh. Two more, on their knees by the fire, were charring lengths of pliant green wood into the angles of sled-runners. Yet another sliced raw moose-hide into slender strips for tie or snowshoe thongs. Sheer in the fire-glow a young muscular breed was pegging out the skin of a wolverine on a flat board. He grinned at Dick in swift delight.
"Huh! You Carcajou," he said. "You no git you man kill, is it not?"
