One look of beaming satisfaction Jamie flung her, then, wriggling from her grasp, he tore away to the door and was seen no more for some time.  Then Katherine turned to Mrs. M’Kree and said imploringly:  “Please tell me where you got that bucket from, and how long you have had it?”

“I’ll tell you, of course, seeing that you make such a point of it, but I’m not specially proud of the business, I can assure you,” Mrs. M’Kree said, with a touch of irritability very unusual with her.  “Oily Dave was up here about a week ago, and he said that he had some buckets of rough fat that would do for greasing sledge runners, or to mix with caulking pitch.  He told us he bought the stuff from one of the American whalers that were fishing in the bay last summer, and he offered to sell us a bucket at such a ridiculously low price that Astor bought one off-hand.”

“What happened then?” demanded Katherine, her lips twitching with amusement; for she knew quite enough of Oily Dave and his methods to be sure that Astor M’Kree had been rather badly duped.

“The stuff was more than half sawdust, but it had been worked in so carefully that you could not tell that until you came to rub the grease on to runners and that sort of thing; then of course it gritted up directly.  But the worst of it was that Astor had mixed some of it with a lot of caulking pitch, which of course is quite spoiled, and he was about the maddest man in Keewatin on the day that he found it out.”

Katherine was laughing; she really could not help it.  But Mrs. M’Kree, not understanding where the joke came in, said in a reproachful tone:  “My dear, it was not a laughing matter to me, either then or now; for when one is married what affects one’s husband affects one’s self also, and that sometimes in a very disagreeable fashion.”

“Please forgive me for laughing!” cried Katherine.  “But Oily Dave is such a slippery old rogue, and sometimes he overreaches even himself.”  Then she told Mrs. M’Kree about the disappearance of the lard, and how she had recognized the bucket upon which Jamie had been drumming so vigorously.

“What will you do?” asked Mrs. M’Kree.

“I don’t see what we can do, except keep a sharper lookout in future.  There is not enough evidence to go and boldly accuse him of having walked off with two buckets of lard for which he had not paid.  There may be a hundred buckets like that in the district, every one of which has contained grease of some description, from best dairy butter down to train oil mixed with sawdust,” Katherine replied with a laugh, in which the other now joined.

“It is a good thing you can laugh about it; but I am afraid that I shouldn’t have felt like laughing if I had been in your case,” said Mrs. M’Kree.  Then she cried out in protest:  “Must you go so soon, really?  Why, you have been here no time at all, and there are heaps of things I wanted to say to you.”