I shall show them that they are being robbed and cheated and forced into ignominious serfdom.  And mark you this:  if I can’t reach them upon the river, I shall go to your village, or post, or fort, or whatever you call your Snare Lake rendezvous, and I shall point out to them their wrongs.  I shall appeal to their better natures—­to their manhood, and womanhood.  That’s what I think of your command!  I do not fear you!  I despise you!”

MacNair nodded, gravely.

“I have already learned that women are as honest as men—­more so, even, than most men.  You are honest, and you are earnest.  You believe in yourself, too.  But you are more of a fool than I thought—­more of a fool than I thought any one could be.  Lapierre is a great fool—­but he is neither honest nor earnest.  He is just a fool—­a wise fool, with the cunning and vices of the wolf, but with none of the wolf’s lean virtues.  You are an honest fool.  You are like a young moose-calf, who, because he happens to be born into the world, thinks the world was made for him to be born into.

“Let us say the moose-calf was born upon a great mountain—­a mountain whose sides are crossed and recrossed by moose-trails—­paths that wind in and out among the trees, stamped by the hoofs of older and wiser moose.  Upon these paths the moose-calf tries his wobbly legs, and one day finds himself gazing out upon a plain where grass is.  He has no use for grass—­does not even know what grass is for.  Only he sees no paths out there.  The grass covers a quagmire, but of quagmires the moose-calf knows nothing, having been born upon a mountain.

“Being a fool, the moose-calf soon tires of the beaten paths.  He ventures downward toward the plain.  A wolf, skulking through the scrub at the foot of the mountain, encounters, by chance, the moose-calf.  The calf is fat.  But, the wolf is cunning.  He dares not harm the moose-calf hard by the trails of the mountain.  He becomes friendly, and the fool moose-calf tells the wolf where he is bound.  The wolf offers to accompany him, and the moose-calf is glad—­here is a friend—­one who is wiser than the moose-kind, for he fears not to venture into the country of no trails.

“Between the mountain and the plain stands a tree.  This tree the wolf hates.  Many squirrels work about its roots, and these squirrels are fatter than the squirrels of the scrub, for the tree feeds them.  But, when the wolf would pounce upon them, they seek safety in the tree.  The moose-calf—­the poor fool moose-calf—­comes to this tree, and, finding no paths curving around its base, becomes enraged because the tree does not step aside and yield the right of way.  He will charge the tree!  He does not know that the tree has been growing for many years, and has become deeply rooted—­immovable.  The wolf looks on and smiles.  If the moose-calf butts the tree down, the wolf will get the squirrels—­and the calf.  If the calf does not, the wolf will get the calf.”