More than once Philip Steele had told himself that he was born a century or two after his time.  He had admitted this much to a few of his friends, and they had laughed at him.  One evening he had opened his heart a little to the girl of the hyacinth letter, and after that she had called him eccentric.  Within himself he knew that he was unlike other men, that the blood in him was calling back to almost forgotten generations, when strong hearts and steady hands counted for manhood rather than stocks and bonds, and when romance and adventure were not quite dead.  At college he took civil engineering, because it seemed to him to breathe the spirit of outdoors; and when he had finished he incurred the wrath of those at home by burying himself for a whole year with a surveying expedition in Central America.

It was this expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele.  He came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an Aztec—­a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father’s millions as though they had never been.  He possessed a fortune in his own right, but as yet he had found no use for the income that was piling up.  A second expedition, this time to Brazil, and then he came back—­to meet the girl of the hyacinth letter.  And after that, after he had broken from the bondage which held Moody, and Fordney, and Whittemore, he went back to his many adventures.

It was the North that held him.  In the unending desolations of snow and forest and plain, between Hudson’s Bay and the wild country of the Athabasca, he found the few people and the mystery and romance which carried him back, and linked him to the dust-covered generations he had lost.  One day a slender, athletically built young man enlisted at Regina for service in the Northwest Mounted Police.  Within six months he had made several records for himself, and succeeded in having himself detailed to service in the extreme North, where man-hunting became the thrilling game of One against One in an empty and voiceless world.  And no one, not even the girl of the hyacinth letter, would have dreamed that the man who was officially listed as “Private Phil Steele, of the N.W.M.P.,” was Philip Steele, millionaire and gentleman adventurer.

None appreciated the humor of this fact more than Steele himself, and he fell again into his wholesome laugh as he placed a fresh pine log on the fire, wondering what his aristocratic friends—­and especially the girl of the hyacinth letter—­would say if they could see him and his environment just at the present moment.  In a slow, chuckling survey he took in the heavy German socks which he had hung to dry close to the fire; his worn shoe-packs, shining in a thick coat of caribou grease, and his single suit of steaming underwear that he had washed after supper, and which hung suspended from the ceiling, looking for all the world, in the half dusk of the