comparative poverty to the next post of De Seviere.

Further progress that year was impossible. Therefore, the contract of
the trappers with the factor.

And Maren Le Moyne--venturer of the venturers, flame of fire among
them, urger, inspirer, and moral leader, a living pillar before them in
her eagerness--must needs curb her soul in bonds of patience and wait
at Fort de Seviere for another spring.

Close beside her in her visions and her high hope, her courage and her
eagerness, stood that leader of the little band, Prix Laroux. Fed by
her fire, touched by her enthusiasm, the man was the mouth piece for
the woman's force, the masculine expression of that undying hope of
conquest which had drawn the small party together and set it forth on
the perilous venture of pushing toward the unknown West to find for
itself an ideal holding.

Back at Grand Portage the girl had listened from her late childhood to
tales of the wilderness told at her father's cabin by voyageurs and
trappers, by returning wanderers and stray Indians smoking the peace-
pipe at his hearth. Long before she had reached the stature of woman
she had sat on her stool beside that jovial old man, her father, grimy
from his forge, and drunk the tales wide-eyed, to creep away and watch
the stars, to dream of those dashing streams and to clinch her hands
for that she was not born a man.

And then when she was fifteen had come the day when the tales had at
last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which
slept unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way