word is their law, and their priests but do my bidding, else would I not suffer them.  When I speak for them I speak for myself.  We ask to be let alone.  We do not want your kind.  If we permit you to sit by our fires, after you will come your church, your priests, and your gods.  And know this, for each white man who comes to my village, him will I make deny his god.  You are the first, and I give you grace.  So it were well you go, and go quickly.”

“I am not responsible for my brothers,” the second man spoke up, filling his pipe in a meditative manner.  Hay Stockard was at times as thoughtful of speech as he was wanton of action; but only at times.

“But I know your breed,” responded the other.  “Your brothers are many, and it is you and yours who break the trail for them to follow.  In time they shall come to possess the land, but not in my time.  Already, have I heard, are they on the head-reaches of the Great River, and far away below are the Russians.”

Hay Stockard lifted his head with a quick start.  This was startling geographical information.  The Hudson Bay post at Fort Yukon had other notions concerning the course of the river, believing it to flow into the Arctic.

“Then the Yukon empties into Bering Sea?” he asked.

“I do not know, but below there are Russians, many Russians.  Which is neither here nor there.  You may go on and see for yourself; you may go back to your brothers; but up the Koyukuk you shall not go while the priests and fighting men do my bidding.  Thus do I command, I, Baptiste the Red, whose word is law and who am head man over this people.”

“And should I not go down to the Russians, or back to my brothers?”

“Then shall you go swift-footed before your god, which is a bad god, and the god of the white men.”

The red sun shot up above the northern sky-line, dripping and bloody.  Baptiste the Red came to his feet, nodded curtly, and went back to his camp amid the crimson shadows and the singing of the robins.

Hay Stockard finished his pipe by the fire, picturing in smoke and coal the unknown upper reaches of the Koyukuk, the strange stream which ended here its arctic travels and merged its waters with the muddy Yukon flood.  Somewhere up there, if the dying words of a ship-wrecked sailorman who had made the fearful overland journey were to be believed, and if the vial of golden grains in his pouch attested anything,—­somewhere up there, in that home of winter, stood the Treasure House of the North.  And as keeper of the gate, Baptiste the Red, English half-breed and renegade, barred the way.

“Bah!” He kicked the embers apart and rose to his full height, arms lazily outstretched, facing the flushing north with careless soul.

II