On this day, the forenoon of the sixth since the agent had departed into the north, the end of the tense period of waiting was expected.  Porcupine City had almost ceased to carry on the daily monotony of business.  A score were lounging about the recorder’s office.  Women looked forth at frequent intervals through the open doors of the “city’s” cabins, or gathered in two and threes to discuss this biggest sporting event ever known in the history of the town.  Not a minute but scores of anxious eyes were turned searchingly up the river, down which the returning agent’s canoe would first appear.  With the dawn of this day O’Grady had refused to drink.  He was stripped to the waist.  His laugh was louder.  Hatred as well as triumph glittered in his eyes, for to-day Jan Larose looked him coolly and squarely in the face, and nodded whenever he passed.  It was almost noon when Jan spoke a few low words to his watchful Indian and walked to the top of the cedar-capped ridge that sheltered Porcupine City from the north winds.

From this ridge he could look straight into the north—­the north where he was born.  Only the Cree knew that for five nights he had slept, or sat awake, on the top of this ridge, with his face turned toward the polar star, and his heart breaking with loneliness and grief.  Up there, far beyond where the green-topped forests and the sky seemed to meet, he could see a little cabin nestling under the stars—­and Marie.  Always his mind traveled back to the beginning of things, no matter how hard he tried to forget—­even to the old days of years and years ago when he had toted the little Marie around on his back, and had crumpled her brown curls, and had revealed to her one by one the marvelous mysteries of the wilderness, with never a thought of the wonderful love that was to come.  A half frozen little outcast brought in from the deep snows one day by Marie’s father, he became first her playmate and brother—­and after that lived in a few swift years of paradise and dreams.  For Marie he had made of himself what he was.  He had gone to Montreal.  He had learned to read and write, he worked for the Company, he came to know the outside world, and at last the Government employed him.  This was a triumph.  He could still see the glow of pride and love in Marie’s beautiful eyes when he came home after those two years in the great city.  The Government sent for him each autumn after that.  Deep into the wilderness he led the men who made the red and black lined maps.  It was he who blazed out the northern limit of Banksian pine, and his name was in Government reports down in black and white—­so that Marie and all the world could read.