The telegraphic importance of the Flats consisted in the fact that it was the starting point of three telegraph lines to remote trading posts up North.  Not many messages came therefrom, but the few that did come generally amounted to something worth while.  Days and even weeks would pass without a single one being clicked to the Flats.  Carey was debarred from talking over the wires to the Prince Albert man for the reason that they were on officially bad terms.  He blamed the latter for his transfer to the Flats.

Carey slept in a loft over the office, and got his meals as Joe Esquint’s, across the “street.”  Joe Esquint’s wife was a good cook, as cooks go among the breeds, and Carey soon became a great pet of hers.  Carey had a habit of becoming a pet with women.  He had the “way” that has to be born in a man and can never be acquired.  Besides, he was as handsome as clean-cut features, deep-set, dark-blue eyes, fair curls and six feet of muscle could make him.  Mrs. Joe Esquint thought that his mustache was the most wonderfully beautiful thing, in its line, that she had ever seen.

Fortunately, Mrs. Joe was so old and fat and ugly that even the malicious and inveterate gossip of skulking breeds and Indians, squatting over teepee fires, could not hint at anything questionable in the relations between her and Carey.  But it was a different matter with Tannis Dumont.

Tannis came home from the academy at Prince Albert early in July, when Carey had been at the Flats a month and had exhausted all the few novelties of his position.  Paul Dumont had already become so expert at the code that his mistakes no longer afforded Carey any fun, and the latter was getting desperate.  He had serious intentions of throwing up the business altogether, and betaking himself to an Alberta ranch, where at least one would have the excitement of roping horses.  When he saw Tannis Dumont he thought he would hang on awhile longer, anyway.

Tannis was the daughter of old Auguste Dumont, who kept the one small store at the Flats, lived in the one frame house that the place boasted, and was reputed to be worth an amount of money which, in half-breed eyes, was a colossal fortune.  Old Auguste was black and ugly and notoriously bad-tempered.  But Tannis was a beauty.

Tannis’ great-grandmother had been a Cree squaw who married a French trapper.  The son of this union became in due time the father of Auguste Dumont.  Auguste married a woman whose mother was a French half-breed and whose father was a pure-bred Highland Scotchman.  The result of this atrocious mixture was its justification—­Tannis of the Flats—­who looked as if all the blood of all the Howards might be running in her veins.