half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom.  Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter.  A billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone.  The low sound was everywhere—­among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine thinly between the little stars.

It was not at all the woman who would conquer a wilderness, that huddled in a dejected little heap at the foot of the banskian; but a very miserable and depressed girl, who swallowed hard to keep down the growing lump in her throat, and bit her lip, and stared with wide eyes toward the southward.  Hot tears—­tears of bitter, heart-sickening loneliness—­filled her eyes and trickled unheeded down her cheeks beneath the tightly drawn mosquito-net.

Darkness deepened, imperceptibly, surely, fore-shortening the horizon, and by just so much increasing the distance that separated her from her people.

“Poor fool moose-calf,” she murmured, “you weren’t satisfied to follow the beaten trails.  You had to find a land of your own—­a land that——­”

The whispered words trailed into silence, and to her mind’s eye appeared the face of the man who had spoken those words—­the face of Brute MacNair.  She saw him as he stood that day and faced her among the freshly chopped stumps of the clearing.

“He is rough and bearlike—­boorish,” she thought, as she remembered that the man had not removed his hat in her presence.  “He called me names.  He is uncouth, cynical, egotistical.  He thinks he can scare me into leaving his Indians alone.”  Her lips trembled and tightened.  “I am a woman, and I’ll show him what a woman can do.  He has lived among the Indians until he thinks he owns them.  He is hard, and domineering, and uncompromising, and skeptical.  And yet—­” What gave her pause was so intangible, so chaotic, in her own mind as to form itself into no definite idea.

“He is brutish and brutal and bad!” she muttered aloud at the memory of Lapierre’s battered face, and immediately fell to comparing the two men.

Each seemed exactly what the other was not.  Lapierre was handsome, debonair, easy of speech, and graceful of movement; deferential, earnest, at times even pensive, and the possessor of ideals; generous and accommodating to a fault, if a trifle cynical; maligned, hated, discredited by the men who ruled the North, yet brave and infinitely capable—­she remembered the swift fate of Vermilion.

His was nothing of the rugged candour of MacNair—­the bluff straightforwardness that overrides opposition; ignores criticism.  MacNair fitted the North—­the big, brutal, insatiate North—­the North of storms, of cold and fighting things; of foaming, roaring white-water and seething, blinding blizzards.

Chloe’s glance strayed out over the river, where the farther bank showed only the serried sky-line of a wall of jet.