Chloe appeared at the door with her letters.  Lapierre took them, and again bowed low over her hand.  This time the girl was sure his lips touched her finger-tips.  He released the hand and stepped to the ground.

“Good-bye,” he said, “I shall try my utmost to pay you a visit before I depart for the southward, but if I fail, remember to send LeFroy to me at Fort Resolution.”

“I will remember.  Good-bye—­bon voyage——­”

“Et prompt retour?” The man’s lips smiled, and his eyes flashed the question.

“Et prompt retour—­certainement!” answered the girl as, with a wide sweep of his hat, the quarter-breed turned and made his way toward the camp of the Indians, which was located in a spruce thicket a short distance above the clearing.  As he disappeared in the timber, Chloe felt a sudden sinking of the heart; a strange sense of desertion, of loneliness possessed her as she gazed into the deepening shadows of the wall of the clearing.  She fumed impatiently.

“Why should I care?” she muttered, “I never laid eyes on him until two weeks ago, and besides, he’s—­he’s an Indian!  And yet—­he’s a gentleman.  He has been very kind to me—­very considerate.  He is only a quarter-Indian.  Many of the very best families have Indian blood in their veins—­even boast of it.  I—­I’m a fool!” she exclaimed, and passed quickly into the house.

Pierre Lapierre was a man, able, shrewd, unscrupulous.  The son of a French factor of the Hudson Bay Company and his half-breed wife, he was sent early to school, where he remained to complete his college course; for it was the desire of his father that the son should engage in some profession for which his education fitted him.

But the blood of the North was in his veins.  The call of the North lured him into the North, and he returned to the trading-post of his father, where he was given a position as clerk and later appointed trader and assigned to a post of his own far to the northward.

While the wilderness captivated and entranced him, the humdrum life of a trader wearied him.  He longed for excitement—­action.

During the several years of his service with the great fur company he assiduously studied conditions, storing up in his mind a fund of information that later was to stand him in good stead.  He studied the trade, the Indians, the country.  He studied the men of the Mounted, and smugglers, and whiskey-runners, and free-traders.  And it was in a brush with these latter that he overstepped the bounds which, under the changed conditions, even the agents of the great Company might not go.

Chafing under the loss of trade by reason of an independent post that had been built upon the shore of his lake some ten miles to the southward, his wild Metis blood called for action and, hastily summoning a small band of Indians, he attacked the independents.  Incidentally, the free-traders’ post was burned, one of the traders killed, and the other captured and sent upon the longue traverse.  In some unaccountable manner, after suffering untold hardships, the man won through to civilization and promptly had Pierre Lapierre brought to book.