erre dragged out of Carrigan's memory. It came to
him now why the name "Boulain" had pounded so insistently in his brain.
He had seen this pennon with its white bear and fighting wolves only
once before, and that had been over a Boulain scow at Chipewyan. But
his memory had lost its grip on that incident while retaining vividly
its hold on the stories and rumors of the mystery-man, St. Pierre.

Carrigan pulled himself a little higher on his pillow and with a new
interest scanned the cabin. He had never heard of Boulain women. Yet
here was the proof of their existence and of the greatness that ran in
the red blood of their veins. The history of the great northland,
hidden in the dust-dry tomes and guarded documents of the great
company, had always been of absorbing interest to him. He wondered why
it was that the outside world knew so little about it and believed so
little of what it heard. A long time ago he had penned an article
telling briefly the story of this half of a great continent in which
for two hundred years romance and tragedy and strife for mastery had
gone on in a way to thrill the hearts of men. He had told of huge forts
with thirty-foot stone bastions, of fierce wars, of great warships that
had fired their broadsides in battle in the ice-filled waters of
Hudson's Bay. He had described the coming into this northern world of
thousands and tens of thousands of the bravest and best-blooded men of
England and France, and how these thousands had continued to come,
bringing with them the names of kings, of princes, and of great lords,
until out of the savagery of the north rose an aristocracy of race
built up of the strongest men of the earth. And these men of later days
he had called Lords of the North--men who had held power of life and
death in the hollow of their hands until the great company yielded up
its suzerainty to the Government of the Dominion in 1870; men who were
kings in their domains, whose word was law, who were more powerful in
their wilderness castles than their mistress over the sea, the Queen of
Britain.

And Carrigan, after writing of these things, had stuffed his manuscript
away in the bottom of his chest at barracks, for he believed that it
was not in his power to do justice to the people of this wilderness
world that he loved. The powerful old lords were gone. Like dethroned
monarchs, stripped to the level of other men, they lived in the
memories of what had been. Their might now lay i