"Bo' jou', bo' jou', Me-en-gen," said they.

"Bo' jou', bo' jou'," said he.

He touched two of the men lightly on the shoulder. They arose, for they
knew him as the bowsman of the Factor's canoe, and so understood that
Galen Albret desired their presence.

Me-en-gen led the way in silence, across the grass-plot, past the
flag-staff, to the foot of the steps leading to the Factory veranda.
There the Indian left them. They mounted the steps. A voice halted them
in the square of light cast through an intervening room from a lighted
inner apartment.

The veranda was wide and low; railed in; and, except for the square of
light, cast in dimness. A dozen men sat in chairs, smoking. Across the
shaft of light the smoke eddied strangely. A woman's voice accompanied
softly the tinkle of a piano inside. The sounds, like the lamplight,
were softened by the distance of the intervening room.

Of the men on the veranda Galen Albret's identity alone was evident.
Grim, four-square, inert, his very way of sitting his chair, as though
it were a seat of judgment and he the interpreter of some fierce
blood-law, betrayed him. From under the bushy white tufts of his
eyebrows the woodsmen felt the search of his inspection. Unconsciously
they squared their shoulders.

The older had some fifty-five or sixty years, though his frame was
still straight and athletic. A narrow-brimmed slouch hat shadowed quiet,