“He had a prospecting pard,” said Jim, “whom he idolized.  This man, whose name was Ramsey, Jack Ramsey, went out in ’97 between the Coast Range and the Rockies, and now this sentimental old pioneer says he will never leave the Peace River until he finds Ramsey’s bones.

“You see,” Cromwell continued, “friendship here and what goes for friendship outside are vastly different.  The matter of devoting one’s life to a friend or to a duty, real or fancied, is only a trifle to these men who abide in the wilderness.  I know of a Chinaman and a Cree who lived and died the most devoted friends.  You see the Missourian hovering about the last camping-place of his companion.  Behold the factor!  He has left the Hudson Bay Company after thirty years because he has lost his life’s best friend, a man who spoke another language, whose religion was not the brand upon which the factor had been brought up in England; yet they were friends.”

The camp fire had gone out.  In the south we saw the first faint flush of dawn as Cromwell, knocking the ashes from his pipe, advised me to go to bed.  “You get the old factor to tell you the story of his friend the cure, and of the cure’s Christmas gift,” Cromwell called back, and I made a point of getting the story, bit by bit, from the florid factor himself, and you shall read it as it has lingered in my memory.

When the new cure came to Chinook on the Upper Peace River, he carried a small hand-satchel, his blankets, and a crucifix.  His face was drawn, his eyes hungry, his frame wasted, but his smile was the smile of a man at peace with the world.  The West—­the vast, undiscovered Canadian West—­jarred on the sensitive nerves of this Paris-bred priest.  And yet, when he crossed the line that marks what we are pleased to call “civilization,” and had reached the heart of the real Northwest, where the people were unspoiled, natural, and honest, where a handful of Royal Northwest Mounted Police kept order in an empire that covers a quarter of a continent, he became deeply interested in this new world, in the people, in the imperial prairies, the mountains, and the great wide rivers that were racing down to the northern sea.

The factor at the Hudson’s Bay post, whose whole life since he had left college in England had been passed on the Peace River, at York Factory, and other far northern stations over which waved the Hudson’s Bay banner, warmed to the new cure from their first meeting, and the cure warmed to him.  Each seemed to find in the other a companion that neither had been able to find among the few friends of his own faith.

And so, through the long evenings of the northern winter, they sat in the cure’s cabin study or by the factor’s fire, and talked of the things which they found interesting, including politics, literature, art, and Indians.  Despite the great gulf that rolled between the two creeds in which they had been cradled, they found that they were in accord three times in five—­a fair average for men of strong minds and inherent prejudices.  At first the cure was anxious to get at the real work of “civilizing” the natives.