able feature,
though it was difficult to say whether their color was gray or
hazel-brown, for they were singularly clear, and there was something
which suggested steadfastness in their unwavering gaze. The man wore
long boots, trousers of old blue duck, and a jacket of soft deerskin
such as the Blackfeet dress so expertly; and there was nothing about him
to suggest that he was a man of varied experience, and of some
importance in that country.

Harry Wyllard was native-born. In his young days he had assisted his
father in the working of a little Manitoban farm, when the great grain
province was still, for the most part, a wilderness. A prosperous
relative on the Pacific slope had sent him to Toronto University, where
after a session or two he had become involved in a difference of opinion
with the authorities. Though the matter was never made quite clear, it
was generally believed that Wyllard had quietly borne the blame of a
comrade's action, for there was a vein of eccentric generosity in the
lad. In any case, he left Toronto, and the relative, who was largely
interested in the fur business, next sent him north to the Behring Sea.
The business was then a hazardous one, for the skin buyers and pelagic
sealers had trouble with the Alaskan representatives of American trading
companies, upon whose preserves they poached, as well as with the
commanders of the gunboats sent up north to protect the seals.

Men's lives were staked against the value of a fur, edicts were lightly
contravened, and now and then a schooner barely escaped into the
smothering fog with skins looted on forbidden beaches. It was a perilous
life, and a strenuous one, for every white man's hand was against the
traders; there were rangers in fog and gale, and the reefs that lay in
the tideways of almost uncharted waters; but Wyllard made the most of
his chance. He kept the peace with jealous skippers who resented the
presence of a man they might command as mate, but whose views they were
forced to listen to when he spoke as supercargo. He won the good-will of
sea-bred Indians, and drove a good trade with them; he not infrequently
brought his boat loaded with reeking skins back first to the plunging
schooner.

He fell into trouble again when they were hanging off the Eastern Isles
under double reefs, watching for the Russians' seals. A boat's crew from
another schooner had been cast ashore, and, as the men were in peril of
falling into the Russians' han