fortunate. He
had in him an infinitesimal measure of the Cree, which made him
understand what the winds sometimes whispered in the pine-tops; and a
part of him was French, which added jet to his eyes and a twist to his
tongue and made him susceptible to the beautiful, and the rest was
"just white"--the part of him that could be stirred into such thoughts
and visions as he was now thinking and dreaming of the Englishman.

The "honor of the Beeg Snows" was a part of Jan's soul; it was his
religion, and the religion of those few others who lived with him four
hundred miles from a settlement, in a place where God's name could not
be spelled or written. It meant what civilization could not understand,
and the Englishman could not understand--freezing and slow starvation
rather than theft, and the living of the tenth commandment above all
other things. It came naturally and easily, this "honor of the Beeg
Snows." It was an unwritten law which no man cared or dared to break,
and to Jan, with his Cree and his French and his "just white" blood, it
was in full measure just what the good God meant it to be.

He moved now toward the little isolated cabin, half hidden in its drift
of snow, keeping well in the deep shadows of the spruce and balsam, and
when he stopped again he saw faintly a gleam of light falling in a wan
streak through a big hole in a curtained window. Each night, always
when the twenty-odd souls of the post were deep in slumber, Jan's heart
would come near to bursting with joy at the sight of this grow from the
snow-smothered cabin, for it told him that the most beautiful thing in
the world was safe and well. He heard, suddenly, the slamming of a
door, and the young Englishman's whistle sounded shrill and untuneful
as he went to his room in the factor's house. For a moment Jan
straightened himself rigidly, and there was a strange tenseness in the
thin, dark face that he turned straight up to where the Northern Lights
were shivering in their midnight play. When he looked again at the
light in the little cabin the passion-blood was rushing through his
veins, and he fingered the hilt of the hunting knife in his belt.

The most beautiful thing in the world had come into Jan's life, and the
other lives at the post, just two summers before. Cummins, red-headed,
lithe as a cat, big-souled as the eternal mountain of the Crees and the
best of the Company's hunters, had brought her up as his bride.
Seventeen rough hearts h