religion, and the religion of these others who lived four hundred
miles or more from a southern settlement.

It meant what civilization could not understand--freezing and slow
starvation rather than theft, and respect for the tenth commandment
above all other things. It meant that up here, under the cold chill of
the northern skies, things were as God meant them to be, and that a
few of His creatures could live in a love that was neither possession
nor sin.

A year after Cummins brought his wife into the North, a man came to
the post from Fort Churchill, on Hudson's Bay. He was an Englishman,
belonging to the home office of the Hudson's Bay Company in London. He
brought with him something new, as the woman had brought something
new; only in this instance it was an element of life which Cummins'
people could not understand.

It breathed of tragedy from the first, to the men of the post. To the
Englishman, on the other hand, it promised to be but an incident--a
passing adventure in pleasure. Here again was that difference of
viewpoint--the eternity of difference between the middle and the end
of the earth.

Cummins was away for a month on a trap-line that went into the Barren
Lands. At these times the woman fell as a heritage to those who
remained, and they watched over her as a parent might guard its child.
Yet the keenest eyes would not have perceived that this was so.

With Cummins gone, the tragedy progressed swiftly toward finality. The
Englishman came from among women. For months he had been in a torment