was a long and dangerous mission to perform it was somehow arranged so that he was left behind.  Only Jan and one or two others knew why his traps made the best catch of fur, for more than once he had slipped a mink of an ermine or a fox into one of Cummins’ traps, knowing that it would mean a luxury or two for the woman and the baby.  And when Cummins left the post, sometimes for a day and sometimes longer, the mother and her child fell as a brief heritage to those who remained.  The keenest eyes would not have discovered that this was so.

In the second year, with the beginning of trapping, fell the second and third great events.  Cummins disappeared.  Then came the Englishman.  For a time the first of these two overshadowed everything else at the post.  Cummins had gone to prospect a new trap-line, and was to sleep out the first night.  The second night he was still gone.  On the third day came the “Beeg Snow.”  It began at dawn, thickened as the day went, and continued to thicken until it became that soft, silent deluge of white in which no man dared venture a thousand yards from his door.  The Aurora was hidden.  There were no stars in the sky at night.  Day was weighted with a strange, noiseless gloom.  In all that wilderness there was not a creature that moved.  Sixty hours later, when visible life was resumed again, the caribou, the wolf and the fox dug themselves up out of six feet of snow, and found the world changed.

It was at the beginning of the “Beeg Snow” that Jan went to the woman’s cabin.  He tapped upon her door with the timidity of a child, and when she opened it, her great eyes glowing at him in wild questioning, her face white with a terrible fear, there was a chill at his heart which choked back what he had come to say.  He walked in dumbly and stood with the snow falling off him in piles, and when Cummins’ wife saw neither hope nor foreboding in his dark, set face she buried her face in her arms upon the little table and sobbed softly in her despair.  Jan strove to speak, but the Cree in him drove back what was French and “just white,” and he stood in mute, trembling torture.  “Ah, the Great God!” his soul was crying.  “What can I do?”

Upon its little cot the woman’s child was asleep.  Beside the stove there were a few sticks of wood.  He stretched himself until his neck creaked to see if there was water in the barrel near the door.  Then he looked again at the bowed head and the shivering form at the table.  In that moment Jan’s resolution soared very near to the terrible.

“Mees Cummin, I go hunt for heem!” he cried.  “I go hunt for heem—­an’ fin’ heem!”

He waited another moment, and then backed softly toward the door.

“I hunt for heem!” he repeated, fearing that she had not heard.