Six or seven years ago Peter God had come to the post for the first time with his furs.  He had given his name as Peter God, and the Company had not questioned it, or wondered.  Stranger names than Peter’s were a part of the Northland; stranger faces than his came in out of the white wilderness trails; but none was more silent, or came in and went more quickly.  In the gray of the afternoon he drove in with his dogs and his furs; night would see him on his way back to the Barrens, supplies for another three months of loneliness on his sledge.

It would have been hard to judge his age—­had one taken the trouble to try.  Perhaps he was thirty-eight.  He surely was not French.  There was no Indian blood in him.  His heavy beard was reddish, his long thick hair distinctly blond, and his eyes were a bluish-gray.

For seven years, season after season, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s clerk had written items something like the following in his record-books: 

Feb. 17.  Peter God came in to-day with his furs.  He leaves this afternoon or to-night for his trapping grounds with fresh supplies.

The year before, in a momentary fit of curiosity, the clerk had added: 

Curious why Peter God never stays in Fort MacPherson overnight.

And more curious than this was the fact that Peter God never asked for mail, and no letter ever came to Fort MacPherson for him.

The Great Barren enveloped him and his mystery.  The yapping foxes knew more of him than men.  They knew him for a hundred miles up and down that white finger of desolation; they knew the peril of his baits and his deadfalls; they snarled and barked their hatred and defiance at the glow of his lights on dark nights; they watched for him, sniffed for signs of him, and walked into his clever deathpits.

The foxes and Peter God!  That was what this white world was made up of—­foxes and Peter God.  It was a world of strife between them.  Peter God was killing—­but the foxes were winning.  Slowly but surely they were breaking him down—­they and the terrible loneliness.  Loneliness Peter God might have stood for many more years.  But the foxes were driving him mad.  More and more he had come to dread their yapping at night.  That was the deadly combination—­night and the yapping.  In the day-time he laughed at himself for his fears; nights he sweated, and sometimes wanted to scream.  What manner of man Peter God was or might have been, and of the strangeness of the life that was lived in the maddening loneliness of that mystery-cabin in the edge of the Barren, only one other man knew.

That was Philip Curtis.

Two thousand miles south, Philip Curtis sat at a small table in a brilliantly lighted and fashionable cafe.  It was early June, and Philip had been down from the North scarcely a month, the deep tan was still in his face, and tiny wind and snow lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes.  He exuded the life of the big outdoors as he sat opposite pallid-cheeked and weak-chested Barrow, the Mica King, who would have given his millions to possess the red blood in the other’s veins.