“When summer dawned and a clerk came to open the post, he saw the slit in the window, and upon entering the tent saw the eight skins on the stack of tweeds, the four skins on the tobacco, and the others on the chest, and understood.

“Presently he saw the skins which the Indian had hung upon the hook, took them down, counted them carefully, appraised them, and made an entry in the Receiving Book, in which he credited ‘Indian-cut-the-window, 37 skins.’

“Yesterday Dunraven came to the post and confessed.

“It was to reward him for his honesty that I gave him the fur coat and looped the big brass baggage check in his buttonhole. Voila!”

The cure crossed his legs and then recrossed them, tossed his head from side to side, drummed upon the closed book which lay in his lap, and showed in any number of ways, peculiar to nervous people, his amazement at the story and his admiration for the Indian.

“Little things like that,” said the factor, filling his pipe, “make me timid when talking to a Cree about ‘being good.’”

* * * * *

When summer came, and with it the smell of flowers and the music of running streams, the factor and his friend the cure used to take long tramps up into the highlands, but the cure’s state of health was a handicap to him.  The factor saw the telltale flush in the priest’s face and knew that the “White Plague” had marked him; yet he never allowed the cure to know that he knew.  That summer a little river steamer was sent up from Athabasca Lake by the Chief Commissioner who sat in the big office at Winnipeg, and upon this the factor and his friend took many an excursion up and down the Peace.  The friendship that had grown up between the factor and the new cure formed the one slender bridge that connected the Anglican and the Catholic camps.  Even the “heathen Crees” marvelled that these white men, praying to the same God, should dwell so far apart.  Wing You, who had wandered over from Ramsay’s Camp on the Pine River, explained it all to Dunraven:  “Flenchman and Englishman,” said Wing.  “No ketchem same Glod.  You—­Clee,” continued the wise Oriental, “an’ Englishman good flend—­ketchem same Josh; you call ’im We-sec-e-gea, white man call ’im God.”

And so, having the same God, only called by different names, the Crees trusted the factor, and the factor trusted the Crees.  Their business intercourse was on the basis of skin for skin, furs being the recognized coin of the country.

“Why do you not pay them in cash, take cash in turn, and let them have something to rattle?” asked the cure one day.

“They won’t have it,” said the factor.  “Silver Skin, brother to Dunraven, followed a party of prospectors out to Edmonton last fall and tried it.  He bought a pair of gloves, a red handkerchief, and a pound of tobacco, and emptied his pockets on the counter, so that the clerk in the shop might take out the price of the goods.  According to his own statement, the Indian put down $37.80.  He took up just six-thirty-five.  When the Cree came back to God’s country he showed me what he had left and asked me to check him up.  When I had told him the truth, he walked to the edge of the river and sowed the six-thirty-five broadcast on the broad bosom of the Peace.”