, backed
by red-tape and The Company's seal as big as a saucer, was sent up to
the Churchill Factor. Why had the allowance of Mrs. Blueskin (nee
Running Rabbit) been exceeded? By "return mail" nine months later the
Factor reported,

"The widow's gone,
Her tent's forsaken,
No more she comes
For flour and bacon.
N.B. The cotton was used for her shroud."

The Ancient Company was penny-wise, but in spite of the copybook line,
not pound-foolish, as its dividend paysheets conclusively prove.

There is no desire to show forth these silent ones of the North as
infallible men and immaculate. They make many mistakes; they were and
are delightfully human, and we couldn't picture one of them with a
saintly aureole. But in the past, as in the present, they were large
men; they honoured their word, and you couldn't buy them. Men of action,
whether inside fort walls, bartering in the tepee of the Indian, or off
on silent trails alone,--it has been given to each of them to live life
at firsthand. In every undertaking the determining factor of success is
men, and not money or monopoly. And because the North still breeds men
of the H.B. type, the eye of The Great Company is not dimmed, its force
not abated.

We spoke with no fewer than three men at The Landing who came into the
North in the year of the Klondike rush, that is, just ten years ago.
Into the human warp and woof of the Great Lone Land of Northern Canada
the Klondike gold-rush intruded a new strand. The news of the strike on
Yukon fields flashed round the world on wires invisible and visible,
passed by word of mouth from chum to chum, and by moccasin telegraph was
carried to remotest corners of the continent. Gold-fever is a disease
without diagnosis or doctor--infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if
its germ once stirs in a man's blood, till the day of his death he is
not immune from an attack. The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent
swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous
horde,--gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet
firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two
continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.

Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from 'Frisco, Seattle, and
Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have
some records. But of that vast army who from the east and from the south
travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has
eve