“Me gottah drive, you gottah push.  Dogs heap tired.”

Nicholas spoke severely.  The Boy stared a moment at what he mentally called “the nerve of the fella,” laughed, and took hold, swallowing Nicholas’s intimation that he, after all, was far more considerate of the dogs than the person merely sentimental, who had been willing to share his dinner with them.

“How much farther?”

“Oh, pretty quick now.”

The driver cracked his whip, called out to the dogs, and suddenly turned off from the river course.  Unerringly he followed an invisible trail, turning sharply up a slough, and went zig-zagging on without apparent plan.  It was better going when they got to a frozen lake, and the dogs seemed not to need so much encouragement.  It would appear an impossible task to steer accurately with so little light; but once on the other side of the lake it was found that Nicholas had hit a well-beaten track as neatly as a thread finds the needle’s eye.

Far off, out of the dimness, came a sound—­welcome because it was something to break the silence but hardly cheerful in itself.

“Hear that, Nicholas?”

“Mission dogs.”

Their own had already thrown up their noses and bettered the pace.

The barking of the dogs had not only announced the mission to the travellers, but to the mission a stranger at the gates.

Before anything could be seen of the settlement, clumsy, fur-clad figures had come running down the slope and across the ice, greeting Nicholas with hilarity.

Indian or Esquimaux boys they seemed to be, who talked some jargon understanded of the Pymeut pilot.  The Boy, lifting tired eyes, saw something white glimmering high in the air up on the right river bank.  In this light it refused to form part of any conceivable plan, but hung there in the air detached, enigmatic, spectral.  Below it, more on humanity’s level, could be dimly distinguished, now, the Mission Buildings, apparently in two groups with an open space in the middle.  Where are the white people? wondered the Boy, childishly impatient.  Won’t they come and welcome us?  He followed the Esquimaux and Indians from the river up to the left group of buildings.  With the heathen jargon beating on his ears, he looked up suddenly, and realized what the white thing was that had shone out so far.  In the middle of the open space a wooden cross stood up, encrusted with frost crystals, and lifting gleaming arms out of the gloom twenty feet or so above the heads of the people.

“Funny thing for an Agnostic,” he admitted to himself, “but I’m right glad to see a Christian sign.”  And as he knocked at the door of the big two-story log-house on the left he defended himself.  “It’s the swing-back of the pendulum after a big dose of Pymeut and heathen tricks.  I welcome it as a mark of the white man.”  He looked over his shoulder a little defiantly at the Holy Cross.  Recognition of what the high