Seems a brutal thing to have to corral a girl like that. You must have known her pretty well, too."

"I have seen her several times. You have a young Grahame here, haven't you? I came down as far as Chipewyan with him two years ago."

"Oh, I say. Didn't you hear about that? We were all awfully cut up. He got lost last winter. Hunting a Loucheux who'd deserted his family, you know. And there was a blizzard, and—well, it was starvation, I guess, unless the wolves got him first. We came across his bones in the spring. They were stripped clean. There were a few lines in his pocket-book they hadn't touched that. "I've done my best," he said, and I guess he cashed in over trying to get down something about "Tell somebody something." we couldn't read that. I sent his dunnage out by the steamer for the Commissioner to forward back to his people. He came of good stock, you know. I've seen the photographs of his folk and his home in Scotland."

Dick remembered how sure he had been of the baronet father; and he guessed that the pocket-book would go into the family shrine along with perhaps a rutsy claymore worn at Flodden, or a sword broken under Montrose.

"Did he ever shoot a bear?" he asked suddenly.

"Why—was it Grahame or—yes, he did. The first winter he was here."

Dick's lips curved on his pipe-stem into a smile. He had not forgotten the lad's eager words on the Athabaska, and somehow he felt curiously pleased that young Grahame had shot his bear.

Hensham had a couple of gaily-ornamented birch canoes ready at day-break, with a Loucheux Indian of pronounced Japanese type squatted in the stern of each.

"We go up the Peel," he explained. "Then a little river lets us right into the Fishing Lakes. Jelly and Good Boy will get us up in no time. Smells good, this morning, doesn't it?"

The air was still and vital with the frost. Across the foot-hills and the white flanks of the Rockies sunlight dazzled, drawing sharp scents from distant clumps of aspen and tamarac and willow, all mixed with the pungent odours of spruce. In the swampy places over the river,