half-breeds sauntered about, flashing bright teeth and wicked dark
eyes at whom it might concern; the traders gazed stolidily over their
little black pipes, and uttered brief sentences through their thick
black beards. Everywhere was gay sound--the fiddle, the laugh, the
song; everywhere was gay color--the red sashes of the _voyageurs_, the
beaded moccasins and leggings of the _mètis_, the capotes of the
_brigade_, the variegated costumes of the Crees and Ojibways. Like the
wild roses around the edge of the muskegs, this brief flowering of the
year passed. Again the nights were long, again the frost crept down
from the eternal snow, again the wolves howled across barren wastes.

Just now the girl stood ankle-deep in green grasses, a bath of
sunlight falling about her, a tingle of salt wind humming up the river
from the bay's offing. She was clad in gray wool, and wore no hat. Her
soft hair, the color of ripe wheat, blew about her temples, shadowing
eyes of fathomless black. The wind had brought to the light and
delicate brown of her complexion a trace of color to match her lips,
whose scarlet did not fade after the ordinary and imperceptible manner
into the tinge of her skin, but continued vivid to the very edge; her
eyes were wide and unseeing. One hand rested idly on the breech of an
ornamented bronze field-gun.

McDonald, the chief trader, passed from the house to the store where
his bartering with the Indians was daily carried on; the other
Scotchman in the Post, Galen Albret, her father, and the head Factor
of all this region, paced back and forth across the veranda of the
factory, caressing his white beard; up by the stockade, young Achille
Picard tuned his whistle to the note of the curlew; across the meadow
from the church wandered Crane, the little Church of England
missionary, peering from short-sighted pale blue eyes; beyond the