k out its folds his
strong, ruddy face smiled cheerfully at those whom he had interrupted.

Then, suddenly, there came a change in his face. The merriment went
from it. He stared at Father Charles. The priest was rising, his face
more tense and whiter still, his hands reaching out to the stranger.

In another moment the stranger had leaped to him--not to shake his
hands, but to clasp the priest in his great arms, shaking him, and
crying out a strange joy, while for the first time that night the pale
face of Father Charles was lighted up with a red and joyous glow.

After several minutes the newcomer released Father Charles, and turned
to the others with a great hearty laugh.

"Gentlemen," he said, "you must pardon me for interrupting you like
this. You will understand when I tell you that Father Charles is an old
friend of mine, the dearest friend I have on earth, and that I haven't
seen him for years. I was his first penitent!"

PETER GOD

Peter God was a trapper. He set his deadfalls and fox-baits along the
edge of that long, slim finger of the Great Barren, which reaches out
of the East well into the country of the Great Bear, far to the West.
The door of his sapling-built cabin opened to the dark and chilling
gray of the Arctic Circle; through its one window he could watch the
sputter and play of the Northern Lights; and the curious hissing purr
of the Aurora had grown to be a monotone in his ears.

Whence Peter God had come, and how it was that he bore the strange name
by which he went, no man had asked, for curiosity belongs to the white
man, and the nearest white men were up at Fort MacPherson, a hundred or
so miles away.

Six or seven years ago Peter God had come to the post for the first
time with his furs. He had given his name as Peter God, and the Company
had not questioned it, or wondered. Stranger names than Peter's were a
part of the Northland; stranger faces than his came in out of the white
wilderness trails; but none was more silent, or came in and went more
quickly. In the gray of the afternoon he drove in with his dogs and his
furs; night would see him on his way back to the Barrens, supplies for
another three months of loneliness on his sledge.

It would have been hard to judge his age--had one taken the trouble to
try. Perhaps he was thirty-eight. He surely was not French. There was
no Indian blood in him. His heavy beard was reddish, his long thick
hair distinctly blond, and his