"This is Lake Athabasca?" he asked.

"Oui, M'sieu Thompson," Mike Breyette answered from the bow, without
turning his head. "Dees de lak."

"How much longer will it take us to reach Port Pachugan?" Thompson made
further inquiry.

"Bout two-three hour, maybeso," Breyette responded.

He said something further, a few quick sentences in the French patois
of the northern half-breeds, at which both he and his fellow-voyageur in
the stern laughed. Their gayety stirred no response from the midship
passenger. If anything, he frowned. He was a serious-minded young man,
and he did not understand French. He had a faint suspicion that his
convoy did not take him as seriously as he wished. Whether their talk
was badinage or profanity or purely casual, he could not say. In the
first stages of their journey together, on the upper reaches of the
river, Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald had, after the normal habit of
their kind, greeted the several contingencies and minor mishaps such a
journey involved with plaintive oaths in broken English. Mr. Wesley
Thompson, projected into an unfamiliar environment and among a--to
him--strange manner of men, took up his evangelistic cudgel and
administered shocked reproof. It was, in a way, practice for the tasks
the Methodist Board of Home Missions had appointed him to perform. But
if he failed to convict these two of sin, he convinced them of
discourtesy. Even a rude voyageur has his code of manners. Thereafter
they invariably swore in French.

They bore on in a northerly direction, keeping not too far from the lake