“I—­a—­” The Boy had a moment of wondering if he was expected to answer “Hell,” and he hesitated.

“Are you on your way up the river?”

“No—­I” (was the man not going to let them rest their wicked bones there a single night?)—­“a—­I—­”

The frozen river and the wind-racked wood were as hospitable as the beautiful face of the brother.  Involuntarily the Boy shivered.

“I came to see the Father Superior.”

He dropped back into a chair.

“The Father Superior is busy.”

“I’ll wait.”

“And very tired.”

“So’m I.”

“—­worn out with the long raging of the plague.  I have waited till he is less harassed to tell him about the Pymeuts’ deliberate depravity.  Nicholas, too!—­one of our own people, one of the first pupils of the school, a communicant in the church; distinguished by a thousand kindnesses.  And this the return!”

“The return is that he takes his backsliding so to heart, he can’t rest without coming to confess and to beg the Father Superior—­”

“I shall tell the Father Superior what I heard and saw.  He will agree that, for the sake of others who are trying to resist temptation, an example should be made of Nicholas and of his father.”

“And yet you nursed the old man and were kind to him, I believe, after the offense.”

“I—­I thought you had killed him.  But even you must see that we cannot have a man received here as Nicholas was—­the most favoured child of the mission—­who helps to perpetuate the degrading blasphemies of his unhappy race.  It’s nothing to you; you even encourage—­”

“’Pon my soul—­” But Brother Paul struck in with an impassioned earnestness: 

“We spend a life-time making Christians of these people; and such as you come here, and in a week undo the work of years.”

“I—­I?”

“It’s only eighteen months since I myself came, but already I’ve seen—­” The torrent poured out with never a pause.  “Last summer some white prospectors bribed our best native teacher to leave us and become a guide.  He’s a drunken wreck now somewhere up on the Yukon Flats.  You take our boys for pilots, you entice our girls away with trinkets—­”

“Great Caesar! I don’t.”

But vain was protest.  For Brother Paul the visitor was not a particular individual.  He stood there for the type of the vicious white adventurer.

The sunken eyes of the lay-brother, burning, impersonal, saw not a particular young man and a case compounded of mixed elements, but—­The Enemy! against whom night and day he waged incessant warfare.

“The Fathers and Sisters wear out their lives to save these people.  We teach them with incredible pains the fundamental rules of civilization; we teach them how to save their souls alive.”  The Boy had jumped up and laid his hand on the door-knob. “You come.  You teach them to smoke—­”