girl found herself seated upon her bed-roll inside her mosquito-barred
tent of balloon silk. The older woman had revived and lay, a dejected
heap, upon her blankets, and out in front Big Lena was stooping over a
fire. Beyond, upon the gravel, the fires of the scowmen flamed red,
and threw wavering reflections upon the black water of the river.

Chloe was seized with a strange unrest. The sight of Harriet Penny
irritated her. She stepped from the tent and filled her lungs with
great drafts of the spruce-laden night-breeze that wafted gently out of
the mysterious dark, and rippled the surface of the river until little
waves slapped softly against the shore in tiny whisperings of the
unknown--whisperings that called, and were understood by the new
awakened self within her.

She glanced toward the fires of the rivermen where the dark-skinned,
long-haired sons of the wild squatted close about the flames over which
pots boiled, grease fried, and chunks of red meat browned upon the ends
of long toasting-sticks. The girl's heart leaped with the wild freedom
of it. A sense of might and of power surged through her veins. These
men were her men--hers to command. Savages and half-savages whose work
it was to do her bidding--and who performed their work well. The night
was calling her--the vague, portentous night of the land beyond
outposts. Slowly she passed the fires, and on along the margin of the
river whose waters, black and forbidding, reached into the North.

"The unconquered North," she breathed, as she stood upon a water-lapped
boulder and gazed into the impenetrable dark. And, as she gazed,
before her mind's eye rose a vision. The scattered teepees of the
Northland, smoke-blackened, filthy, stinking with the reek of
ill-tanned skins, resolved themselves into a village beside a broad,