John saw the angry look in the men’s eyes, and the cool judgment of Douglas standing between him and bodily harm, and deciding that tact was the better part of valour, changed his attitude of defiance to one of reconciliation.  He could not take revenge now for his fancied wrong.  His Indian cunning told him to wait for a better time.  So he extended his hand to Bob, who, dazed by the suddenness of the unexpected attack, had not moved.  “Shake hands, Bob, an’ call it square.  I was hot with anger an’ didn’t know what I was doin’.  We won’t quarrel.”

Bob, acting upon the motto his mother had taught him—­“Be slow to anger and quick to forgive,” took the outstretched hand with the remark,

“‘Twere a mighty kick I gave ye, John, an’ enough t’ anger ye, an’ no harm’s done.”

Big Dick Blake would not have it so at first, and invited the half-breed outside to take a “licking” at his hands.  But the others soon pacified him, the trouble was forgotten and dancing resumed as though nothing had happened to disturb it.

As soon as attention was drawn from him Micmac John, unobserved, slipped out of the door and a few moments later placed some things in a canoe that had been turned over on the beach, launched it and paddled away in the ghostly light of the rising moon.

The dancing continued until eleven o’clock, then the men lit their pipes, and after a short smoke and chat rolled into their blankets upon the floor, Mrs. Black and the girls retired to the bunks, and, save for a long, weird howl that now and again came from the wolf dogs outside, and the cheery crackling of the stove within, not a sound disturbed the silence of the night.

As has been intimated, Douglas Campbell was a man of importance in Eskimo Bay.  When a young fellow he had come here from the Orkney Islands as a servant of the Hudson’s Bay Company.  A few years later he married a native girl, and then left the company’s service to become a hunter.

He had been careful of his wages, and as he blazed new hunting trails into the wilderness, used his savings to purchase steel traps with which to stock the trails.  Other trappers, too poor to buy traps for themselves, were glad to hunt on shares the trails Douglas made, and now he was reaping a good income from them.  He was in fact the richest man in the Bay.

He was kind, generous and fatherly.  The people of the Bay looked up to him and came to him when they were in trouble, for his advice and help.  Many a poor family had Douglas Campbell’s flour barrel saved from starvation in a bad winter, and God knows bad winters come often enough on the Labrador.  Many an ambitious youngster had he started in life, as he was starting Bob Gray now.

The Big Hill trail, far up the Grand River, was the newest and deepest in the wilderness of all the trails Douglas owned—­deeper in the wilderness than that of any other hunter.  Just below it and adjoining it was William Campbell’s—­a son of Douglas—­a young man of nineteen who had made his first winter’s hunt the year before our story begins; below that, Dick Blake’s, and below Dick’s was Ed Matheson’s.