his wife or his sweetheart or his child to his arms. A swarm of
Indian women and half-grown children set about unloading the
canoes. Virginia's eyes ran over the crews of the various craft.
She recognized them all, of course, to the last Indian packer, for
in so small a community the personality and doings of even the
humblest members are well known to everyone. Long since she had
identified the _brigade_. It was of the Missinaibie, the great
river whose head-waters rise a scant hundred feet from those that
flow as many miles south into Lake Superior. It drains a wild and
rugged country whose forests cling to bowlder hills, whose streams
issue from deep-riven gorges, where for many years the big gray
wolves had gathered in unusual abundance. She knew by heart the
winter posts, although she had never seen them. She could imagine
the isolation of such a place, and the intense loneliness of the
solitary man condemned to live through the dark Northern winters,
seeing no one but the rare Indians who might come in to trade with
him for their pelts. She could appreciate the wild joy of a return
for a brief season to the company of fellow-men.

When her glance fell upon the last of the canoes, it rested with a
flash of surprise. The craft was still floating idly, its bow
barely caught against the bank. The crew had deserted, but
amidships, among the packages of pelts and duffel, sat a stranger,
The canoe was that of the post at Kettle Portage.

She saw the stranger to be a young man with a clean-cut face, a
trim athletic figure dressed in the complete costume of the
_voyageurs_, and thin brown and muscular hands. When the canoe
touched the bank he had taken no part in the scramble to shore, and
so had sat forgotten and unnoticed save by the girl, his figure