wondrous land which he knew, with its billion dazzling stars by night and its eye-blinding brilliancy by day.  For Jan, in a way, was fortunate.  He had in him an infinitesimal measure of the Cree, which made him understand what the winds sometimes whispered in the pine-tops; and a part of him was French, which added jet to his eyes and a twist to his tongue and made him susceptible to the beautiful, and the rest was “just white”—­the part of him that could be stirred into such thoughts and visions as he was now thinking and dreaming of the Englishman.

The “honor of the Beeg Snows” was a part of Jan’s soul; it was his religion, and the religion of those few others who lived with him four hundred miles from a settlement, in a place where God’s name could not be spelled or written.  It meant what civilization could not understand, and the Englishman could not understand—­freezing and slow starvation rather than theft, and the living of the tenth commandment above all other things.  It came naturally and easily, this “honor of the Beeg Snows.”  It was an unwritten law which no man cared or dared to break, and to Jan, with his Cree and his French and his “just white” blood, it was in full measure just what the good God meant it to be.

He moved now toward the little isolated cabin, half hidden in its drift of snow, keeping well in the deep shadows of the spruce and balsam, and when he stopped again he saw faintly a gleam of light falling in a wan streak through a big hole in a curtained window.  Each night, always when the twenty-odd souls of the post were deep in slumber, Jan’s heart would come near to bursting with joy at the sight of this grow from the snow-smothered cabin, for it told him that the most beautiful thing in the world was safe and well.  He heard, suddenly, the slamming of a door, and the young Englishman’s whistle sounded shrill and untuneful as he went to his room in the factor’s house.  For a moment Jan straightened himself rigidly, and there was a strange tenseness in the thin, dark face that he turned straight up to where the Northern Lights were shivering in their midnight play.  When he looked again at the light in the little cabin the passion-blood was rushing through his veins, and he fingered the hilt of the hunting knife in his belt.

The most beautiful thing in the world had come into Jan’s life, and the other lives at the post, just two summers before.  Cummins, red-headed, lithe as a cat, big-souled as the eternal mountain of the Crees and the best of the Company’s hunters, had brought her up as his bride.  Seventeen rough hearts had welcomed them.  They had assembled about that little cabin in which the light was shining, speechless in their adoration of this woman who had come among them, their caps in their hands, faces shining, eyes shifting before the glorious ones that looked at them and smiled at them as the woman shook their hands, one by one.  Perhaps she was not beautiful, as most people judge.  But she was beautiful