as huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled
back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador,
you would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity.

Only at seasons did the bay share the gloom of the cliff. When out
of its shadow it was, in summer, very bright and playful, sometimes
boisterous, often idle, coquetting with the sands. There was a great
difference between the cliff and the bay: the cliff was only as it
appeared, but the bay was a shameless hypocrite. For under one shoulder
it hid a range of reefs, and, at a spot where the shadows of the cliff
never reached it, and the sun played with a grim kind of joy, a long
needle of rock ran up at an angle under the water, waiting to pierce
irresistibly the adventurous ship that, in some mad moment, should creep
to its shores.

The man was more like the cliff than the bay: stern, powerful, brooding.
His only companions were the Indians, who in summer-time came and went,
getting stores of him, which he in turn got from a post of the Hudson's
Bay Company, seventy miles up the coast. At one time the Company,
impressed by the number of skins brought to them by the pilot, and the
stores he bought of them, had thought of establishing a post at Belle
Amour; but they saw that his dealings with them were fair and that he
had small gain, and they decided to use him as an unofficial agent, and
reap what profit was to be had as things stood. Kenyon, the Company's
agent, who had the Post, was keen to know why Gaspard the pilot lived at
Belle Amour. No white man sojourned near him, and he saw no one save
now and then a priest who travelled silently among the Indians, or
some fisherman, hunter, or woodsman, who, for pleasure or from pure
adventure, ran into the bay and tasted the hospitality tucked away on a
ledge of the Cliff of the King.

To Kenyon, Gaspard was unresponsive, however adroit the catechism.
Father Corraine also, who sometimes stepped across the dark threshold of
Gaspard's hut, would have, for the man's soul's sake, dug out the heart
of his secret; but Gaspard, open with food, fire, blanket, and tireless
attendance, closed like the doors of a dungeon when the priest would
have read him. At the name of good Ste. Anne he would make the sacred
gesture, and would take a blessing when the priest passed from his hut
to go again into the wilds; but when pressed to disclose his mind and
history, he would always say: "M'sieu