id in the days of Radisson and good Prince
Rupert; it was their merriment, their exhilaration, their freedom and
optimism, reaching up to the farthest stars. In that song men were
straining their vocal muscles, shouting to beat out their nearest
neighbor, bellowing like bulls in a frenzy of sudden fun. And then, as
suddenly as it had risen in the night, the clamor of voices died away.
A single shout came up the river. Carrigan thought he heard a low
rumble of laughter. A tin pan banged against another. A dog howled. The
flat of an oar played a tattoo for a moment on the bottom of a boat.
Then one last yell from a single throat--and the night was silent again.

And that was the Boulain Brigade--singing at this hour of the night,
when men should have been sleeping if they expected to be up with the
sun. Carrigan stared ahead. Shortly his adventure would take a new
twist. Something was bound to happen when they got ashore. The peculiar
glow of the fires had puzzled him. Now he began to understand. Jeanne
Marie-Anne Boulain's men were camped in the edge of the tar-sands and
had lighted a number of natural gas-jets that came up out of the earth.
Many times he had seen fires like these burning up and down the Three
Rivers. He had lighted fires of his own; he had cooked over them and
had afterward had the fun and excitement of extinguishing them with
pails of water. But he had never seen anything quite like this that was
unfolding itself before his eyes now. There were seven of the fires
over an area of half an acre--spouts of yellowish flame burning like
giant torches ten or fifteen feet in the air. And between them he very
soon made out great bustle and activity. Many figures were moving
about. They looked like dwarfs at first, gnomes at play in a little
world made out of witchcraft. But Bateese was sending the canoe nearer
with powerful strokes, and the figures grew taller, and the spouts of
flame higher. Then he knew what was happening. The Boulain men were
taking advantage of the cool hours of the night and were tarring up.

He could smell the tar, and he could see the big York boats drawn up in
the circle of yellowish light. There were half a dozen of them, and men
stripped to the waist were smearing the bottoms of the boats with
boiling tar and pitch. In the center was a big, black cauldron steaming
over a gas-jet, and between this cauldron and the boats men were
running back and forth with pails. Still nearer to the hu