ting together on the stony desolation struck him anew with the paltry weakness of them. Like a flake of foam off the lake they marked the shore for a moment and passed, leaving all as it had been and would continue to be. Those stones and that grey tossing lake and these barren cliffs were the only things unswayed by passion, unbroken by life. There was a stateliness, a dignity in the slowness and the surety of their changes. To Dick there was an irrelevant mockery, an almost disgusting levity about the rapidity of the changes in man. The difference seemed to put him, with his few puny years, on a level with those frail canoes and the tents that stamped no impress on the stones below them.
Then he backed up from the wind round the corner of the bluff, lit his pipe, and opened the wallet to find out in what words Robison and Ducane had endeavoured to insure a future paradise for both.
There were a score of things in the wallet. Unpaid bills in plenty; a note from Jennifer—Dick knew her writing, and he thrust that sheet back hastily; some accounts; some memorandums; finally a dirty piece of paper folded very small.
"I fancy that looks like Robison's thumb-mark," said Dick, and he opened it, smothering an oath at seeing that it was written in smudged pencil.
Then, picking out the words in Ducane's crabbed handwriting with difficulty, he read it.
The whole of the account was ill-constructed and full of repetition. It had evidently been drawn up on that night at Chipewyan when Ducane had decided to decamp and Robison had preferred to chance the possibility that Dick might have come on other business. First came Robison's promise to get Ducane smuggled away east towards Hudson Bay through the Quatre Fourches Indians, on condition that Ducane agreed to the following requirements. Robison's name was set in his big black hand to that. And then came the requirements; and before Dick had got through their tangled phraseology and their strange mixture of cant and bold courage and real faith, he was not feeling himself such a very much better man than this coarse, blunt-minded breed, who had gone to his death for
