d to be solved. It was a problem which taxed
every quality of an able mind. The situation had at last become acute,
and Time, the solvent of most complications, had not quite eased the
strain. Indeed, on the day that Fleda Druse had made her journey down
the Carillon Rapids, Time's influence had not availed. So he had gone
fishing, with millions at stake--to the despair of those who were
risking all on his skill and judgment.

But that was Ingolby. Thinking was the essence of his business, not
Time. As fishing was the friend of thinking, therefore he fished in
Seely's Eddy, saw Fleda Druse run the Carillon Rapids, saved her from
drowning, and would have brought her in pride and peace to her own home,
but that she decreed otherwise.

CHAPTER IV. THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE

Gabriel Druse's house stood on a little knoll on the outskirts of the
town of Manitou, backed by a grove of pines. Its front windows faced the
Sagalac, and the windows behind looked into cool coverts where in old
days many Indian tribes had camped; where Hudson's Bay Company's men had
pitched their tents to buy the red man's furs. But the red man no longer
set up his tepee in these secluded groves; the wapiti and red deer had
fled to the north never to return, the snarling wolf had stolen into
regions more barren; the ceremonial of the ancient people no longer
made weird the lonely nights; the medicine-man's incantations, the
harvest-dance, the green-corn-dance, the sun-dance had gone. The braves,
their women, and their tepees had been shifted to reservations where
Governments solemnly tried to teach them to till the field, and grow
corn, and drive the cart to market; while yet they remembered the herds
of buffalo which had pounded down the prairie like storm-clouds and
given their hides for the tepee; and the swift deer whose skins made the
wigwam luxurious.

Originally Manitou had been the home of Icelanders, Mennonites,
and Doukhobors; settlers from lands where the conditions of earlier
centuries prevailed, who, simple as they were in habits and in life,
were ignorant, primitive, coarse, and none too cleanly.

They had formed an unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place
assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation
was formed near by. When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the
place became less discordant to the life of a new democracy, though
they did little to make it modern in the sense that Lebanon