"Good-by, Miss
Elliston," he said gravely. "Beware of Pierre Lapierre." Chloe made
no reply and as MacNair turned to go, he chanced to glance into the
wide, expressionless face of Big Lena, who had stood throughout the
interview leaning heavily against the jamb of the kitchen door.
Something inscrutable in the stare of the fishlike, china-blue eyes
clung in his memory, and try as he would in the days that followed,
MacNair could not fathom the meaning of that stare, if indeed it had
any meaning. MacNair did not know why, but in some inexplainable
manner the memory of that look eased many a weary mile.

CHAPTER XVII

A FRAME-UP

News, of a kind, travels on the wings of the wind across wastes of the
farther land. Principalities may fall, nations crash, and kingdoms
sink into oblivion, and the North will neither know nor care. For the
North has its own problems--vital problems, human problems--and
therefore big. Elemental, portentous problems, having to do with life
and the eating of meat.

In the crash and shift of man-made governments; in the redistribution
of man-constituted authority, and man-gathered surplus of increment,
the North has no part. On the cold side of sixty there is no surplus,
and men think in terms of meat, and their possessions are meat-getting
possessions. Guns, nets, and traps, even of the best, insure but a
bare existence. And in the lean years, which are the seventh
years--the years of the rabbit plague--starvation stalks in the
teepees, and gaunt, sunken-eyed forms, dry-lipped, and with the skin
drawn tightly over protruding ribs, stiffen between shoddy blankets.
For even the philosophers of the land of God and the H.B.C. must eat to
live--if not this week, at least once next week.

The H.B.C., taking wise cognizance of the seventh year, extends it
credit--"debt" it is called in the outlands--but it puts no more wool
in its blankets, and for lack of food the body-fires burn low. But the
cold remains inexorable. And with the thermometer at seventy degrees
below zero, even in the years of plenty, when the philosophers eat
almost daily, there is little of comfort. With the thermometer at
seventy in the lean years, the suffering is diminished by the passing
of many philosophers.

The arrest of Bob MacNair was a matter of sovereign import to the
dwellers of the frozen places, and word of it swept like wildfire
through the land of the lakes and rivers. Yet in all the North tho