The commission to despatch explorers to the inland country proved the sensation of a century at the fort.  Round the long mess-room table gathered officers and traders, intent on the birch-bark maps drawn by old Indian chiefs of an unknown interior, where a “Far-Off-Metal River” flowed down to the Northwest Passage.  Huge log fires blazed on the stone hearths at each end of the mess room.  Smoky lanterns and pine fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light from rafters that girded ceiling and walls.  On the floor of flagstones lay enormous skins of the chase—­polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly.  Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders.  Draped across the walls were Company flags—­an English ensign with the letters “H.  B. C.” painted in white on a red background, or in red on a white background.

At the head of the table sat one of the most remarkable scoundrels known in the annals of the Company, Moses Norton, governor of Fort Prince of Wales, a full-blooded Indian, who had been sent to England for nine years to be educated and had returned to the fort to resume all the vices and none of the virtues of white man and red.  Clean-skinned, copper-colored, lithe and wiry as a tiger cat, with the long, lank, oily black hair of his race, Norton bore himself with all the airs of a European princelet and dressed himself in the beaded buckskins of a savage.  Before him the Indians cringed as before one of their demon gods, and on the same principle.  Bad gods could do the Indians harm.  Good gods wouldn’t.  Therefore, the Indians propitiated the bad gods; and of all Indian demons Norton was the worst.  The black arts of mediaeval poisoning were known to him, and he never scrupled to use them against an enemy.  The Indians thought him possessed of the power of the evil eye; but his power was that of arsenic or laudanum dropped in the food of an unsuspecting enemy.  Two of his wives, with all of whom he was inordinately jealous, had died of poison.  Against white men who might offend him he used more open means,—­the triangle, the whipping post, the branding iron.  Needless to say that a man who wielded such power swelled the Company’s profits and stood high in favor with the directors.  At his right hand lay an enormous bunch of keys.  These he carried with him by day and kept under his pillow by night.  They were the keys to the apartments of his many wives, for like all Indians Norton believed in a plurality of wives, and the life of no Indian was safe who refused to contribute a daughter to the harem.  The two master passions of the governor were jealousy and tyranny; and while he lived like a Turkish despot himself, he ruled his fort with a rod of iron and left the brand of his wrath on the person of soldier or officer who offered indignity to the Indian race.  It was a common thing for Norton to poison an Indian who refused to permit a daughter to join the collection of wives; then to flog