The Free Trader's speech as he left the room, however, had touched the
one flaw in Galen Albret's confidence of righteousness. Wearied with
the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his brain numbed,
his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated himself and
contemplated the images those two words had called up.

Graehme Stewart! That man he had first met at Fort Rae over twenty
years ago. It was but just after he had married Virginia's mother. At
once his imagination, with the keen pictorial power of those who have
dwelt long in the Silent Places, brought forward the other scene--that
of his wooing. He had driven his dogs into Fort la Cloche after a hard
day's run in seventy-five degrees of frost. Weary, hungry,
half-frozen, he had staggered into the fire-lit room. Against the
blaze he had caught for a moment a young girl's profile, lost as she
turned her face toward him in startled question of his entrance. Men
had cared for his dogs. The girl had brought him hot tea. In the
corner of the fire they two had whispered one to the other--the
already grizzled traveller of the silent land, the fresh, brave
north-maiden. At midnight, their parkas drawn close about their faces
in the fearful cold, they had met outside the inclosure of the Post.
An hour later they were away under the aurora for Qu'Apelle. Galen
Albret's nostrils expanded as he heard the _crack, crack, crack_ of
the remorseless dog-whip whose sting drew him away from the vain
pursuit. After the marriage at Qu'Apelle they had gone a weary journey
to Rae, and there he had first seen Graehme Stewart.

Fort Rae is on the northwestward arm of the Great Slave Lake in the
country of the Dog Ribs, only four degrees under the Arctic Circle. It
is a dreary spot, for the Barren Grounds are near. Men see only the