“The world still doesn’t know.  The word never got out.”

“The word never gets out,” Snass assured him pleasantly.

“You mean if they had been alive when you found them—?”

Snass nodded.  “They would have lived on with me and my people.”

“Anton got out,” Smoke challenged.

“I do not remember the name.  How long ago?”

“Fourteen or fifteen years,” Smoke answered.

“So he pulled through, after all.  Do you know, I’ve wondered about him.  We called him Long Tooth.  He was a strong man, a strong man.”

“La Perle came through here ten years ago.”

Snass shook his head.

“He found traces of your camps.  It was summer time.”

“That explains it,” Snass answered.  “We are hundreds of miles to the north in the summer.”

But, strive as he would, Smoke could get no clew to Snass’s history in the days before he came to live in the northern wilds.  Educated he was, yet in all the intervening years he had read no books, no newspapers.  What had happened in the world he knew not, nor did he show desire to know.  He had heard of the miners on the Yukon, and of the Klondike strike.  Gold-miners had never invaded his territory, for which he was glad.  But the outside world to him did not exist.  He tolerated no mention of it.

Nor could Labiskwee help Smoke with earlier information.  She had been born on the hunting-grounds.  Her mother had lived for six years after.  Her mother had been very beautiful—­the only white woman Labiskwee had ever seen.  She said this wistfully, and wistfully, in a thousand ways, she showed that she knew of the great outside world on which her father had closed the door.  But this knowledge was secret.  She had early learned that mention of it threw her father into a rage.

Anton had told a squaw of her mother, and that her mother had been a daughter of a high official in the Hudson Bay Company.  Later, the squaw had told Labiskwee.  But her mother’s name she had never learned.

As a source of information, Danny McCan was impossible.  He did not like adventure.  Wild life was a horror, and he had had nine years of it.  Shanghaied in San Francisco, he had deserted the whaleship at Point Barrow with three companions.  Two had died, and the third had abandoned him on the terrible traverse south.  Two years he had lived with the Eskimos before raising the courage to attempt the south traverse, and then, within several days of a Hudson Bay Company post, he had been gathered in by a party of Snass’s young men.  He was a small, stupid man, afflicted with sore eyes, and all he dreamed or could talk about was getting back to his beloved San Francisco and his blissful trade of bricklaying.