ough, for which McPherson had just mulcted him of
thrice its value. "The canoe! Is it not--not--what you Yankees
call--a bute?"

"Oh, the canoe," she repeated, with a falling inflection of chagrin.

"No! No! Pardon!" He stamped angrily upon the ground. "It is not
so. It is not you. It is not the canoe. It is--ah! I have it now!
It is your promise. One day, do you not remember, at Madame
Schoville's, we talked of the canoe, and of my ignorance, which was
sad, and you promised, you said--"

"I would give you your first lesson?"

"And is it not delightful? Listen! Do you not hear? The
rippling--ah! the rippling!--deep down at the heart of things! Soon
will the water run free. Here is the canoe! Here we meet! The first
lesson! Delightful! Delightful!"

The next island below Split-up was known as Roubeau's Island, and was
separated from the former by a narrow back-channel. Here, when the
bottom had about dropped out of the trail, and with the dogs swimming
as often as not, arrived St. Vincent--the last man to travel the winter
trail. He went into the cabin of John Borg, a taciturn, gloomy
individual, prone to segregate himself from his kind. It was the
mischance of St. Vincent's life that of all cabins he chose Borg's for
an abiding-place against the break-up.

"All right," the man said, when questioned by him. "Throw your
blankets into the corner. Bella'll clear the litter out of the spare
bunk."

Not till evening did he speak again, and then, "You're big enough to do
your own cooking. When the woman's done with the stove you can fire
away."

The woman, or Bella, was a comely Indian girl, young, and the prettiest
St. Vincent had run across. Instead of the customary greased
swarthiness of the race, her skin was clear and of a light-bronze tone,
and her features less harsh, more felicitously curved, than those
common to the blood.

After supper, Borg, both elbows on table and huge misshapen hands
supporting chin and jaws, sat puffing stinking Siwash tobacco and
staring straight before him. It would have seemed ruminative, the
stare, had his eyes been softer or had he blinked; as it was, his face
was set and trance-like.

"Have you been in the country long?" St. Vincent asked, endeavoring to
make conversation.

Borg turned his sullen-black eyes upon him, and seemed to look into him
and through him and beyond him, and, still regarding him, to have
forgotten all about him. It was as t