l the magician
who inspired it.

Two days later they had landed in a country whose relation to that which
Keeko knew was only in the swarming flies and mosquitoes, and the keen
air, which, even in the height of the open season, warned her of the
terrors which must reign when the aurora lit the night of winter.

"Guess this is Paradise," Marcel explained, in answer to Keeko's
expressed delight at the wide openness of it all, and at the sight of
the sparse, lean Arctic grass which replaced the monotony of the
shadowed river. "Guess it's a matter of contrasts," he went on. "It's
kind of light, I guess, and it makes you think it's green. There's bush,
or scrub, and bluffs of timber. But there's other things. It's mostly a
sort of tundra and muskeg. There's more flies to the square inch than
you'd reckon there's room for. But it's the home of the silver fox
that's never been hunted."

His words were lost upon the girl. Her whole attention had become
absorbed with her first glance out across the lake. She was staring at a
range of tremendous hills far away to the north-east, and her wonder-lit
eyes were held by a strange phenomenon that filled the sky.

It was a blaze of ruddy light tinting a world of frothing cloud. To her
it looked like a stormy oasis in the steely blue of an almost cloudless
sky. It might have been the splendid light of an angry sunset, only that
the sun was shining directly behind her. She pointed at it.

"That!" she cried, in a startled, hushed voice. "What's that?"

Marcel regarded the scene for some silent moments. It was a spectacle
that stirred him. He was closer to Nature than he knew. The primitive
was deeply rooted in him for all the pains at which Uncle Steve had been
to widen his outlook through the learning which his dead father had left
behind. Here was a caldron of fire playing its reflection upon a tumult
of cloud. The cloud itself stood unaccounted in a perfect sky.

But the answer came readily. Marcel knew those streaks of red and gold,
those rosy tints in contrast against the threatening cloud. They were
the lights of Unaga. The lights from the Heart of Unaga, the dread Heart
that haunted the Indian mind, and the secret of which Uncle Steve had so
recently disclosed to him.

What could he say to this girl to whom he could not lie?

Doubt and hesitancy passed. These things could not long exist in a
nature such as his.

"Guess I haven't seen it ever like that before," he said. Th