to the west, and rumor spread that they were to give sixty pounds of
flour to the company's forty, and four feet of cloth to the yard. This
meant action among Williams and his people, and the factor himself
plunged into the wilderness. Mukee, the half-Cree, went among his
scattered tribesmen along the edge of the barrens, stirring them by
the eloquence of new promises and by fierce condemnation of the
interlopers to the west. Old Per-ee, with a strain of Eskimo in him,
went boldly behind his dogs to meet the little black people from
farther north, who came down after foxes and half-starved polar bears
that had been carried beyond their own world on the ice-floes of the
preceding spring. Young Williams, the factor's son, followed after
Cummins, and the rest of the company's men went into the south and
east.

The exodus left desolate lifelessness at the post. The windows of the
fireless cabins were thick with clinging frost. There was no movement
in the factor's office. The dogs were gone, and wolves and lynx
sniffed closer each night. In the oppression of this desertion, the
few Indian and half-breed children kept indoors, and Williams'
Chippewayan wife, fat and lazy, left the company's store securely
locked.

In this silence and lifelessness Jan Thoreau felt a new and ever-
increasing happiness. To him the sound of life was a thing vibrant
with harshness; quiet--the dead, pulseless quiet of lifelessness--was
beautiful. He dreamed in it, and it was then that his fingers
discovered new things in his violin.

He often sent Maballa, the Indian woman who cared for Melisse, to
gossip with Williams' wife, so that he was alone a great deal with the