birdlike, pleading glances, as though praying him to be kind. He
took no notice after that, so the act seemed less like a caress
than a matter of course. He began to talk, half-humorously, and
little by little, as he went on, she forgot her fears, even her
feeling of strangeness, and fell completely under the spell of his
power.

"My name is Ned Trent," he told her, "and I am from Quebec. I am a
woods runner. I have journeyed far. I have been to the uttermost
ends of the North even up beyond the Hills of Silence." And then,
in his gay, half-mocking, yet musical voice he touched lightly on
vast and distant things. He talked of the great Saskatchewan, of
Peace River, and the delta of the Mackenzie, of the winter journeys
beyond Great Bear Lake into the Land of the Little Sticks, and the
half-mythical lake of Yamba Tooh. He spoke of life with the Dog
Ribs and Yellow Knives, where the snow falls in midsummer. Before
her eyes slowly spread, like a panorama, the whole extent of the
great North, with its fierce, hardy men, its dreadful journeys by
canoe and sledge, its frozen barrens, its mighty forests, its
solemn charm. All at once this post of Conjurors House, a month in
the wilderness as it was, seemed very small and tame and civilized
for the simple reason that Death did not always compass it about.

"It was very cold then," said Ned Trent "and very hard. _Le grand
frete_ [froid--cold] of winter had come. At night we had no other
shelter than our blankets, and we could not keep a fire because the
spruce burned too fast and threw too many coals. For a long time
we shivered, curled up on our snowshoes; then fell heavily asleep,
so that even the dogs fighting over us did not awaken us. Two or
three times in the night we boiled tea. We had to thaw our