Each evening Lapierre repaired to the cottage, and LeFroy at his post in the storehouse nodded sagely to himself as the notes of the girl’s rich contralto floated loud and clear above the twang of the accompanying guitar.

Always the quarter-breed spoke eagerly to Chloe of the proposed trip to Snare Lake, and bitterly he regretted the enforced delay incident to outfitting the trappers.  And always, with the skill and finesse of the born intriguer, by a smile, a suggestion, or an adroitly worded question, he managed to foster and to intensify her hatred for Brute MacNair.

On the sixth day after their departure, the scouts returned from the Northward and reported that MacNair had travelled for many days across the barrens, in search of the caribou herds.  Followed, then, another conference with LeFroy.  The remaining canoemen were outfitted with surprising celerity.  And at midnight a big freight canoe, loaded to the gunwale with an assortment of cheap knives and hatchets, bolts of gay-coloured cloth, and cheaper whiskey broke through the ever thickening skim of shore ice, and headed Northward under the personal direction of that master of all whiskey runners, Louis LeFroy.

The next day Lapierre, with a great show of eagerness, informed Chloe that he was ready to undertake the journey to Snare Lake.  Enthusiastically the girl set about her preparation, and the following morning, accompanied by Big Lena and Lapierre, took her place in a canoe manned by four lean-shouldered paddlers.

Just below “the narrows,” on the northeastern shore of Snare Lake, and almost upon the site of Old Fort Enterprise, erected and occupied by Lieutenant, later Sir John Franklin during the second winter of his first Arctic expedition, Bob MacNair had built his fort.  The fort itself differed in no important particular from many of the log trading forts of the Hudson Bay Company.  Grouped about the long, low building, within the enclosure of the log stockade, were the cabins of Indians who had forsaken the vicissitudes of the lean, barren grounds and attached themselves permanently to MacNair’s colony.

Under his tutelage, they learned to convert the work of their hands into something more nearly approaching the comforts of existence than anything they had ever known.  Where, as trappers of fur, they had succeeded, by dint of untold hardship and privation and suffering, in obtaining the barest necessities of life from the great fur company, they now found themselves housed in warm, comfortable cabins, eating good food, and clothing their bodies, and the bodies of their wives and children, in thick, warm clothing that defied the rigours of the Arctic winters.

While to the credit of each man, upon MacNair’s books, stood an amount in tokens of “made beaver,” which to any trapper in all the Northland would have spelled wealth beyond wildest dreams.  And so they came to respect this stern, rugged man who dealt with them fairly—­to love him, and also to fear him.  And upon Snare Lake his word became the law, from which there was no appeal.  Tender as a woman in sickness, counting no cost or hardship too dear in the rendering of assistance to the needy, he was at the same time hard and unbending toward wilful offenders, and a very real terror to the enemies of his people.