At first the men sang their canoe songs, but as the swift rush of the birch-barks brought them almost to their journey’s end, they burst into wild shrieks and whoops of delight.

All at once they were close to hand.  The steersman rose to throw his entire weight on the paddle.  The canoe swung abruptly for the shore.  Those in it did not relax their exertions, but continued their vigorous strokes until within a few yards of apparent destruction.

“Hola! hola!” they cried, thrusting their paddles straight down into the water with a strong backward twist.  The stout wood bent and cracked.  The canoe stopped short and the voyageurs leaped ashore to be swallowed up in the crowd that swarmed down upon them.

The races were about equally divided, and each acted after its instincts—­the Indian greeting his people quietly, and stalking away to the privacy of his wigwam; the more volatile white catching his wife or his sweetheart or his child to his arms.  A swarm of Indian women and half-grown children set about unloading the canoes.  Virginia’s eyes ran over the crews of the various craft.  She recognized them all, of course, to the last Indian packer, for in so small a community the personality and doings of even the humblest members are well known to everyone.  Long since she had identified the brigade.  It was of the Missinaibie, the great river whose head-waters rise a scant hundred feet from those that flow as many miles south into Lake Superior.  It drains a wild and rugged country whose forests cling to bowlder hills, whose streams issue from deep-riven gorges, where for many years the big gray wolves had gathered in unusual abundance.  She knew by heart the winter posts, although she had never seen them.  She could imagine the isolation of such a place, and the intense loneliness of the solitary man condemned to live through the dark Northern winters, seeing no one but the rare Indians who might come in to trade with him for their pelts.  She could appreciate the wild joy of a return for a brief season to the company of fellow-men.

When her glance fell upon the last of the canoes, it rested with a flash of surprise.  The craft was still floating idly, its bow barely caught against the bank.  The crew had deserted, but amidships, among the packages of pelts and duffel, sat a stranger, The canoe was that of the post at Kettle Portage.

She saw the stranger to be a young man with a clean-cut face, a trim athletic figure dressed in the complete costume of the voyageurs, and thin brown and muscular hands.  When the canoe touched the bank he had taken no part in the scramble to shore, and so had sat forgotten and unnoticed save by the girl, his figure erect with something of the Indian’s stoical indifference.  Then when, for a moment, he imagined himself free from observation, his expression abruptly changed.  His hands clenched tense between his buckskin knees, his eyes glanced here and there restlessly, and an indefinable shadow of something which Virginia felt herself obtuse in labelling desperation, and yet to which she discovered it impossible to fit a name, descended on his features, darkening them.  Twice he glanced away to the south.  Twice he ran his eye over the vociferating crowd on the narrow beach.