', I have nothing to confess."
After a number of years the priest ceased to ask him, and he remained
with the secret of his life, inscrutable and silent.

Being vigilant, one would have seen, however, that he lived in some
land of memory or anticipation, beyond his life of daily toil and usual
dealing. The hut seemed to have been built at a point where east and
west and south the great gulf could be seen and watched. It seemed
almost ludicrous that a man should call himself a pilot on a coast and
at a bay where a pilot was scarce needed once a year. But he was known
as Gaspard the pilot, and on those rare occasions when a vessel did
anchor in the bay, he performed his duties with such a certainty as to
leave unguessed how many deathtraps crouched near that shore. At such
times, however, Gaspard seemed to look twenty years younger. A light
would come into his face, a stalwart kind of pride sit on him, though
beneath there lurked a strange, sardonic look in his deep eyes--such a
grim furtiveness as though he should say: "If I but twist my finger we
are all for the fishes." But he kept his secret and waited. He never
seemed to tire of looking down the gulf, as though expecting some ship.
If one appeared and passed on, he merely nodded his head, hung up his
glass, returned to his work, or, sitting by the door, talked to himself
in low, strange tones. If one came near, making as if it would enter
the bay, a hungry joy possessed him. If a storm was on, the joy was the
greater. No pilot ever ventured to a ship on such rough seas as Gaspard
ventured for small profit or glory.

Behind it all lay his secret. There came one day a man who discovered
it.

It was Pierre, the half-breed adventurer. There was no point in all the
wild northland which Pierre had not touched. He loved it as he loved the
game of life. He never said so of it, but he never said so of the game
of life, and he played it with a deep subterranean joy. He had had his
way with the musk-ox in the Arctic Circle; with the white bear at the
foot of Alaskan Hills; with the seal in Baffin's Bay; with the puma on
the slope of the Pacific; and now at last he had come upon the trail of
Labrador. Its sternness, its moodiness pleased him. He smiled at it the
comprehending smile of the man who has fingered the nerves and the heart
of men and things. As a traveller, wandering through a prison, looks
upon its grim cells and dungeons with the eye of unembarrassed freedom,
fin