ade,--squaws, youngsters, and beggars,--who subsisted
by picking up food from the waste heap of the fort.

The commission to despatch explorers to the inland country proved the
sensation of a century at the fort. Round the long mess-room table
gathered officers and traders, intent on the birch-bark maps drawn by
old Indian chiefs of an unknown interior, where a "Far-Off-Metal River"
flowed down to the Northwest Passage. Huge log fires blazed on the
stone hearths at each end of the mess room. Smoky lanterns and pine
fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light
from rafters that girded ceiling and walls. On the floor of flagstones
lay enormous skins of the chase--polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly.
Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders.
Draped across the walls were Company flags--an English ensign with the
letters "H. B. C." painted in white on a red background, or in red on a
white background.

At the head of the table sat one of the most remarkable scoundrels
known in the annals of the Company, Moses Norton, governor of Fort
Prince of Wales, a full-blooded Indian, who had been sent to England
for nine years to be educated and had returned to the fort to resume
all the vices and none of the virtues of white man and red.
Clean-skinned, copper-colored, lithe and wiry as a tiger cat, with the
long, lank, oily black hair of his race, Norton bore himself with all
the airs of a European princelet and dressed himself in the beaded
buckskins of a savage. Before him the Indians cringed as before one of
their demon gods, and on the same principle. Bad gods could do the
Indians harm. Good gods wouldn't. Therefore, the Indians propitiated
the bad gods; and of all Indian demons Norton was the worst. The black
arts of mediaeval poisoning were known to him, and he never scrupled to
use them against an enemy. The Indians thought him possessed of the
power of the evil eye; but his power was that of arsenic or laudanum
dropped in the food of an unsuspecting enemy. Two of his wives, with
all of whom he was inordinately jealous, had died of poison. Against
white men who might offend him he used more open means,--the triangle,
the whipping post, the branding iron. Needless to say that a man who
wielded such power swelled the Company's profits and stood high in
favor with the directors. At his right hand lay an enormous bunch of
keys. These he carried with him by day