For a brief season, transient as the flash of a loon's wing on the
shadow of a lake, the post was bright with the thronging of many
people. The Indians pitched their wigwams on the broad meadows
below the bend; the half-breeds sauntered about, flashing bright
teeth and wicked dark eyes at whom it might concern; the traders
gazed stolidily over their little black pipes, and uttered brief
sentences through their thick black beards. Everywhere was gay
sound--the fiddle, the laugh, the song; everywhere was gay
color--the red sashes of the _voyageurs_, the beaded moccasins and
leggings of the _metis_, the capotes of the _brigade_, the
variegated costumes of the Crees and Ojibways. Like the wild roses
around the edge of the muskegs, this brief flowering of the year
passed. Again the nights were long, again the frost crept down
from the eternal snow, again the wolves howled across barren wastes.

Just now the girl stood ankle-deep in green grasses, a bath of
sunlight falling about her, a tingle of salt wind humming up the
river from the bay's offing. She was clad in gray wool, and wore
no hat. Her soft hair, the color of ripe wheat, blew about her
temples, shadowing eyes of fathomless black. The wind had brought
to the light and delicate brown of her complexion a trace of color
to match her lips whose scarlet did not fade after the ordinary and
imperceptible manner into the tinge of her skin, but continued
vivid to the very edge; her eyes were wide and unseeing. One hand
rested idly on the breech of an ornamented bronze field-gun.

McDonald, the chief trader, passed from the house to the store
where his bartering with the Indians was daily carried on; the
other Scotchman in the Post, Galen Albret, her father, and the head
Factor of all this region, paced back and forth across the veranda