MacNair’s Indians, who had long since laid down their traps to pick up the white man’s tools, stayed at the school.  And much to the girl’s surprise, under the direction of the refractory Sotenah, and Old Elk, and Wee Johnnie Tamarack, not only performed with a will the necessary work of the camp—­the chopping and storing of firewood, the shovelling of paths through the huge drifts, and the drawing of water from the river—­but took upon themselves numerous other labours of their own initiative.

An ice-house was built and filled upon the bank of the river.  Trees were felled, and the logs ranked upon miniature rollways, where all through the short days the Indians busied themselves in the rude whip-sawing of lumber.

Their women and children daily attended the school and worked faithfully under the untiring tutelage of Chloe and Harriet Penny, who entered into the work with new enthusiasm engendered by the interest and the aptness of the Snare Lake Indians—­absent qualities among the wives and children of Lapierre’s trappers.

LeFroy was kept busy in the storehouse, and with the passing of the days Chloe noticed that he managed to spend more and more time in company with Big Lena.  At first she gave the matter no thought.  But when night after night she heard the voices of the two as they sat about the kitchen-stove long after she had retired, she began to consider the matter seriously.

At first she dismissed it with a laugh.  Of all people in the world, she thought, these two, the heavy, unimaginative Swedish woman, and the leathern-skinned, taciturn wood-rover, would be the last to listen to the call of romance.

Chloe was really fond of the huge, silent woman who had followed her without question into the unknown wilderness of the Northland, even as she had accompanied her without protest through the maze of the far South Seas.  With all her averseness to speech and her vacuous, fishy stare, the girl had long since learned that Big Lena was both loyal and efficient and shrewd.  But, Big Lena as a wife!  Chloe smiled broadly at the thought.

“Poor LeFroy,” she pitied.  “But it would be the best thing in the world for him.  ’The perpetuity of the red race will be attained only through its amalgamation with the white,’” she quoted; the trite banality of one of the numerous theorists she had studied before starting into the North.

Of LeFroy she knew little.  He seemed a half-breed of more than average intelligence, and as for the rest—­she would leave that to Lena.  On the whole, she rather approved of the arrangement, not alone upon the amalgamation theory, but because she entertained not the slightest doubt as to who would rule the prospective family.  She could depend upon Big Lena’s loyalty, and her marriage to one of their number would therefore become a very important factor in the attitude of the Indians towards the school.