Vermilion, the boss scowman, stood upon the running-board of the leading scow and directed the stowing of the freight.  He was a picturesque figure—­Vermilion.  A squat, thick half-breed, with eyes set wide apart beneath a low forehead bound tightly around with a handkerchief of flaming silk.

A heavy-eyed Indian, moving ponderously up the rough plank with a piece balanced upon his shoulders, missed his footing and fell with a loud splash into the water.  The Indian scrambled clumsily ashore, and the piece was rescued, but not before a perfect torrent of French-English-Indian profanity had poured from the lips of the ever-versatile Vermilion.  Harriet Penny shrank against the younger woman and shuddered.

“Oh!” she gasped, “he’s swearing!”

“No!” exclaimed Chloe, in feigned surprise.  “Why, I believe he is!”

Miss Penny flushed.  “But, it is terrible!  Just listen!”

“For Heaven’s sake, Hat!  If you don’t like it, why do you listen?”

“But he ought to be stopped.  I am sure the poor Indian did not try to fall in the river.”

Chloe made a gesture of impatience.  “Very well, Hat; just look up the ordinance against swearing on Slave River, and report him to Ottawa.”

“But I’m afraid!  He—­the Hudson Bay Company’s man—­told us not to come.”

Chloe straightened up with a jerk.  “See here, Hat Penny!  Stop your snivelling!  What do you expect from rivermen?  Haven’t the seven hundred miles of water trail taught you anything?  And, as for being afraid—­I don’t care who told us not to come!  I’m an Elliston, and I’ll go whereever I want to go!  This isn’t a pleasure trip.  I came up here for a purpose.  Do you think I’m going to be scared out by the first old man that wags his head and shrugs his shoulders?  Or by any other man!  Or by any swearing that I can’t understand, or any that I can, either, for that matter!  Come on, they’re waiting for this bale.”

Chloe Elliston’s presence in the far outlands was the culmination of an ideal, spurred by dissuasion and antagonism into a determination, and developed by longing into an obsession.  Since infancy the girl had been left much to her own devices.  Environment, and the prescribed course at an expensive school, should have made her pretty much what other girls are, and an able satellite to her mother, who managed to remain one of the busiest women of the Western metropolis—­doing absolutely nothing—­but, doing it with eclat.

The girl’s father, Blair Elliston, from his desk in a luxurious office suite, presided over the destiny of the Elliston fleet of yellow-stack tramps that poked their noses into queer ports and put to sea with queer cargoes—­cargoes that smelled sweet and spicy, with the spice of the far South Seas.  Office sailor though he was, Blair Elliston commanded the respect of even the roughest of his polyglot crews—­a respect not wholly uncommingled with fear.