river, there was a stampede. But
MacNair owned the land and his Indians were armed. There was a short,
sharp battle, and the stampeders returned to the rivers to nurse their
grievance and curse Brute MacNair.

He paid his debt to the Company and settled with his Indians, who
suddenly found themselves rich. And then Bob MacNair learned a lesson
which he never forgot--his Indians could not stand prosperity. Most of
those who had stood by him all through the lean years when he had
provided them only a bare existence, took their newly acquired wealth
and departed for the white man's country. Some returned--broken husks
of the men who departed. Many would never return, and for their
undoing MacNair reproached himself unsparingly, the while he devised an
economic system of his own, and mined his gold and worked out his
transportation problem upon a more elaborate scale. The harm had been
done, however; his Indians were known to be rich, and MacNair found his
colony had become the cynosure of the eyes of the whiskey-runners, the
chiefest among whom was Pierre Lapierre. It was among these men that
the name of Brute, first used by the beaten stampeders, came into
general use--a fitting name, from their viewpoint--for when one of them
chanced to fall into his hands, his moments became at once fraught with
tribulation.

And so MacNair had become a power in the Northland, respected by the
officers of the Hudson Bay Company, a friend of the Indians, and a
terror to those who looked upon the red man as their natural prey.

Step by step, the events that had been the milestones of this man's
life recurred to his mind as he tramped tirelessly through the scrub
growth of the barrens toward a spot upon the shore of the lake--the
only grass plot within a radius of five hundred miles. Throwing
himself down beside a low, sodded mound in the centre of the plot, he
idly watched the great flocks of water fowls disport themselves upon
the surface of the lake.

How long he lay there, he had no means of knowing, when suddenly his
ears detected the soft swish of paddles. He leaped to his feet and,
peering toward the water, saw, close to the shore, a canoe manned by
four stalwart paddlers. He looked closer, scarcely able to credit his
eyes. And at the same moment, in response to a low-voiced order, the
canoe swung abruptly shoreward and grated upon the shingle of the
beach. Two figures stepped out, and Chloe Elliston, followed by B