I sat thinking desperately of the Eskimo, of the way he had received us and its portent.  There could be only one explanation.  I had no heart now for the competition as to who should first sight the post.  Yet how we hope even when there is nothing left to us but the absence of certainty!  I could not quite give up yet.  Suddenly George exclaimed, “There it is.”  Somehow he seemed nearly always to see things first.

There it was deep in a cove, on the right bank of the river, a little group of tiny buildings nestling in at the foot of a mountain of solid rock.  It seemed almost microscopic in the midst of such surroundings.  The tide was low and a great, boulder-strewn, mud flat stretched from side to side of the cove.  Down from the hills to the east flowed a little stream winding its way through a tortuous channel as it passed out to the river.  We turned into it and followed it up, passing between high mud-banks which obscured the post till we reached a bend where the channel bore away to the farther side of the cove.  Then to my surprise the men suddenly changed paddles for poles and turning the bows inshore poled right on up over the mud-bank.  It was such a funny and novel performance that it snapped the spell for me, and I joined with the men in their shouts of laughter over the antics of the canoe on the slippery mud-bank.  When we finally reached the top and slid out on to the flat, we saw a man, who we supposed must be Mr. Ford, the agent at the post, coming over the mud with his retinue of Eskimo to meet us.

We were all on our feet now waiting.  When he came within hearing, I asked if he were Mr. Ford, and told him who I was and how I had come there.  Then came the, for me, great question, “Has the ship been here?”

He said, “Yes.”

“And gone again?”

“Yes.  That is—­what ship do you mean?  Is there any other ship expected here than the Company’s ship?”

“No, it is the Company’s ship I mean, the Pelican.  Has she been here?”

“Yes,” he said, “she was here last September.  I expect her in September again, about the middle of the month or later.”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE RECKONING

There are times when that which constitutes one’s inner self seems to cease.  So it was with me at the moment Mr. Ford uttered those last words.  My heart should have swelled with emotion, but it did not.  I cannot remember any time in my life when I had less feeling.

Mr. Ford was asking me to come with him to the post house, and looking at my feet.  Then George was seen to rummage in one of the bags and out came my seal-skin boots which I had worn but once, mainly because the woman at Northwest River post who made them had paid me the undeserved compliment of making them too small.  My “larigans,” which had long ago ceased to have any waterproof qualities, were now exchanged for the seal-skins, and thus fortified I stepped out into the slippery mud.  So with a paddle as staff in one hand and Mr. Ford supporting me by the other, I completed my journey to the post.