Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake
Superior, and south of the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as
the Rainy River waterway, there lay a paradise lost in the heart
of a wilderness world--and in that paradise "a little corner of
hell."

That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when
sobbing out the shame and the agony of it to herself. That was
before Peter had come to leaven the drab of her life. But the hell
was still there.

One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top
of Cragg's Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May. In the
whiteness of winter one could look off over a hundred square miles
of freezing forest and swamp and river country, with the gleam of
ice-covered lakes here and there, fringed by their black spruce
and cedar and balsam--a country of storm, of deep snows, and men
and women whose blood ran red with the thrill that the hardship
and the never-ending adventure of the wild.

But this was spring. And such a spring as had not come to the
Canadian north country in many years. Until three days ago there
had been a deluge of warm rains, and since then the sun had
inundated the land with the golden warmth of summer. The last
chill was gone from the air, and the last bit of frozen earth and
muck from the deepest and blackest swamps, North, south, east and
west the wilderness world was a glory of bursting life, of
springtime mellowing into summer. Ridge upon ridge of yellows and
greens and blacks swept away into the unknown distances like the