land about him, the vastness of the harsh primordial world, so
inhospitable, so forbidding under the fierce climate which Nature had
imposed, made no appeal. It served, and so it was sufficient. The lights
and shades under the summer sunlight were full of splendour. No artist
eye could have gazed upon it all and missed its appeal. But these men
lived amidst it the year round, and they had learned something of the
fear which the ruthless northland inspires. To them the beauty of the
open season was a mockery, a sham, the cruel trap of a heartless
mistress.

It was on the wide southern foreshore, just below where the falls of the
Beaver River thundered into the chasm which the centuries of its flood
had hewn in the granite rock, that Standing had founded his great mill.
It lay there, in full view from the hillside, amidst a tangle of stoutly
made roads, where seven years ago not even a game track had existed. He
had set it up beside his water-power, and had given it the name which
belonged to the ruined trading post he had found on the southern
headland of the cove when first he had explored the region. Sachigo. A
native, Labrador word which meant "Storm." The trading post had since
been re-built into a modern wireless station, and so had become no
longer the landmark it once had been. But Standing's whim had demanded
the necessity for preserving the name, if only for the sake of its
meaning.

In seven years the translation of the wilderness had been well-nigh
complete. Its vast desolation remained. That could never change under
human effort. It was one of the oldest regions of the earth's land,
driven and beaten and desolated under a climate beyond words in its
merciless severity. But now the place was peopled. Now human dwellings
dotted the forest foreshore of the cove. And the latter were the homes