awful swarms of mosquitoes, I got through the summer, living on fish,
game and berries. You see, I had become terribly afraid of the Red
Riders--the mounted police. I had heard that sooner or later they always
got a man. I was determined they would not get me.

"At last, snow-fall warned me to prepare for winter. I was in this valley
that day, and I've been here ever since. If I had ever got any pleasure
from that stolen money, which I haven't, I would have paid for that
pleasure a hundred times that first winter. Fortune favored me in one
thing: the caribou came by in great droves, and, before my ammunition was
exhausted, I had secured plenty of meat. But at that, I came near dying
before I learned that one who lives upon a strictly meat diet must
measure carefully the proportions of lean and fat. Someway, I learned.
And somehow, starving, freezing, half-mad of lonesomeness, I got through
the winter, but I am glad you did not see me when the first wild geese
came north. If ever there was a wild man, dressed in skins and dancing in
the sun, it was I."

"But the wheat?" asked Barney. "How did that happen?"

"I am coming to that," smiled his host. "Early that spring," he
continued, passing his hand across his forehead, as if to brush away the
memory of that terrible winter, "the Indians came. They came from the
Dismal Lake region. Driven south by forest fires, they were starving. I
had a little caribou meat and shared it with them; that made them my
everlasting friends."

"And you got the wheat from them?" interposed Barney.

"Hardly. I doubt if they had ever seen a grain of wheat.