183

XVIII Mr. Henderson's Proposition 191

XIX A Widening Horizon 203

XX The Shadow 210

XXI The Renewed Triangle 218

XXII Sundry Reflections 227

XXIII The Fuse-- 235

XXIV --And the Match That Lit the Fuse-- 244

XXV --And the Bomb the Fuse Fired 252

XXVI The Last Bridge 267

XXVII Thompson's Return 273

XXVIII Fair Winds 282

XXIX Two Men and a Woman 291

XXX A Mark to Shoot at 298

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST PROBLEM

Lone Moose snaked its way through levels of woodland and open stretches
of meadow, looping sinuously as a sluggish python--a python that rested
its mouth upon the shore of Lake Athabasca while its tail was lost in a
great area of spruce forest and poplar groves, of reedy sloughs and
hushed lakes far northward.

The waterways of the North are its highways. There are no others. No
wheeled vehicles traverse that silent region which lies just over the
fringe of the prairies and the great Canadian wheat belt. The canoe is
lord of those watery roads; when a man would diverge therefrom he must
carry his goods upon his back. There are paths, to be sure, very faint
in places, padded down by the feet of generations of Athabascan
tribesmen long before the Ancient and Honorable Company of Adventurers
laid the foundation of the first post at Hudson's Bay, long before the
_Half Moon's_ prow first cleft those desolate waters. They have been
trodden, these dim trails, by Scotch and French and English since that
historic event, and by a numerous progeny in whose veins the blood of
all three races mingles with that of the native tribes. But these paths
lead only from stream to stream and from lake to lake. No man familiar
with the North seeks along those faint trails for camp or fur posts or
villages. Wherever in that region red men or white set up a permanent
abode it must of necessity be on the bank of a stream or the shore of a
lake, from whence by canoe and paddle access