laughter, and rising to a steady roar where the swarm of nuggetty, sturdy men clustered thickest round Grange's Hotel and the Stores. Brown-faced and eyed, these men; black-haired, with a flash of white teeth, and gleam of gaudy handkerchief or Indian-work belt about the broad hips, and a glint of things that shone on the slouch hat and the moccasins that were bound with yellow thongs to the ankle. They moved with the swinging tread born of the snow-shoe; they sparred in noisy horse-play, laughing like children, shrilly and often, and in the Hudson Bay Store they drove the two young Ontario clerks to the thin edge of idiocy with their quick-pattered demands in the Cree and Slavi and the Chipewyan French of the outer places.
For they were half-breeds all, from the handsome youth with clear features and haughty head-carriage down through the flat-nosed, slant-eyed Japanese-type to the Indian throw-back, with his black hair, lank either side the raised cheek-bones, and his chin-tuft turning grey. They were the men of the backwoods whose stamping-grounds lay with those of the Indian. They were the men of the trapping-trails, of the silences; the strong men who pitted their flesh and spirit against the white might of the land that bred them; who wrested their right to live from her or yielded her their lives at the call of the river brules, or the breaking ice or the thin far threads of trail in the forest.
By the river-bank lay the reason which had brought them to Grey Wolf; a long line of scows stretched, each behind each, with noses up; broad-hulled and brown and oily-smelling as whales. An hour back the spaces under the wide, high seats and over the broken decking had been bared of the great square packages of pelts, the year's yield of Hudson Bay furs from the North, tracked by the dark-faced breeds up three hundred miles and over of rapid and river and lake. That sweating journey's end came with Grey Wolf, and the long tin Hudson Bay sheds were shut fast on the warm, close-pressed greasy bales that waited the freighter's wagons and the railroad rattle and the deep-sea ships beyond all.
At the window of the little dark office through the Store
