never leave the Peace River until he finds Ramsey's bones.

"You see," Cromwell continued, "friendship here and what goes for
friendship outside are vastly different. The matter of devoting one's
life to a friend or to a duty, real or fancied, is only a trifle to
these men who abide in the wilderness. I know of a Chinaman and a Cree
who lived and died the most devoted friends. You see the Missourian
hovering about the last camping-place of his companion. Behold the
factor! He has left the Hudson Bay Company after thirty years because he
has lost his life's best friend, a man who spoke another language, whose
religion was not the brand upon which the factor had been brought up in
England; yet they were friends."

The camp fire had gone out. In the south we saw the first faint flush
of dawn as Cromwell, knocking the ashes from his pipe, advised me to go
to bed. "You get the old factor to tell you the story of his friend the
curé, and of the curé's Christmas gift," Cromwell called back, and I
made a point of getting the story, bit by bit, from the florid factor
himself, and you shall read it as it has lingered in my memory.

When the new curé came to Chinook on the Upper Peace River, he carried a
small hand-satchel, his blankets, and a crucifix. His face was drawn,
his eyes hungry, his frame wasted, but his smile was the smile of a man
at peace with the world. The West--the vast, undiscovered Canadian
West--jarred on the sensitive nerves of this Paris-bred priest. And yet,
when he crossed the line that marks what we are pleased to call
"civilization," and had reached the heart of the real Northwest, where
the people were unspoiled, natural, and honest, where a handful of Royal
Northwest Mounted Police kept order in an empire that covers a quarter
of a continent, he became deeply interested in this new world, in the