aw Henri placing
poison-baits for the two marauders, he shuddered, and when, day after
day, he saw that these poison-baits were untouched, he rejoiced.
Something in his own nature went out in sympathy to the heroic outlaw of
the trap-line who never failed to give battle to the lynx. Nights in the
cabin he wrote down his thoughts and discoveries of the day. One night
he turned suddenly on Henri.

"Henri, doesn't it ever make you sorry to kill so many wild things?" he
asked.

Henri stared and shook his head.

"I kill t'ousand an' t'ousand," he said. "I kill t'ousand more."

"And there are twenty thousand others just like you in this northern
quarter of the continent--all killing, killing for hundreds of years
back, and yet you can't kill out wild life. The war of Man and the
Beast, you might call it. And, if you could return five hundred years
from now, Henri, you'd still find wild life here. Nearly all the rest of
the world is changing, but you can't change these almost impenetrable
thousands of square miles of ridges and swamps and forests. The
railroads won't come here, and I, for one, thank God for that. Take all
the great prairies to the west, for instance. Why, the old buffalo
trails are still there, plain as day--and yet, towns and cities are
growing up everywhere. Did you ever hear of North Battleford?"

"Is she near Montreal or Quebec?" Henri asked.

Weyman smiled, and drew a photograph from his pocket. It was the picture
of a girl.

"No. It's far to the west, in Saskatchewan. Seven years ago I used to
go up there every year, to shoot prairie chickens, coyotes and elk.
There wasn't any North Battleford then--just the glorious prairie,
hundreds and hundreds of square miles of it. There was a single shack on
the Saskatchewan River, where North Battleford now stands, and I used to
stay there. In that shack there was a little girl, twelve years old. We
used to go out hunting together--for I used to kill things in those
days. And the little girl would cry sometimes when I killed, and I'd
laugh at her.

"Then a railroad came, and then another, and they joined near the shack,
and all at once a town sprang up. Seven years ago there was only the
shack there, Henri. Two years ago there were eighteen hundred people.
This year, when I came through, there were five thousand, and two years
from now there'll be ten thousand.

"On the ground where that shack stood are three banks, with a capital of
forty million doll