servant of the Hudson
Bay Company, driving a paddle with the voyageurs and carrying goods on
his back across the portages, he swiftly rose to a Factorship and took
charge of a trading post at Fort Angelus.

Here, because of his elemental simplicity, he took to himself a native
wife, and, by reason of the connubial bliss that followed, he escaped the
unrest and vain longings that curse the days of more fastidious men,
spoil their work, and conquer them in the end. He lived contentedly, was
at single purposes with the business he was set there to do, and achieved
a brilliant record in the service of the Company. About this time his
wife died, was claimed by her people, and buried with savage circumstance
in a tin trunk in the top of a tree.

Two sons she had borne him, and when the Company promoted him, he
journeyed with them still deeper into the vastness of the North-West
Territory to a place called Sin Rock, where he took charge of a new post
in a more important fur field. Here he spent several lonely and
depressing months, eminently disgusted with the unprepossessing
appearance of the Indian maidens, and greatly worried by his growing sons
who stood in need of a mother's care. Then his eyes chanced upon Lit-
lit.

"Lit-lit--well, she is Lit-lit," was the fashion in which he despairingly
described her to his chief clerk, Alexander McLean.

McLean was too fresh from his Scottish upbringing--"not dry behind the
ears yet," John Fox put it--to take to the marriage customs of the
country. Nevertheless he was not averse to the Factor's imperilling his
own immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an ominous attraction himself
for Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to clinch his own soul's safety by
seeing her married to the Factor.

Nor is it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in
danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She was
pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and
temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called from
her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from
place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of
laughing as lightly as she darted and danced about.

Lit-lit was the daughter of Snettishane, a prominent chief in the tribe,
by a half-breed mother, and to him the Factor fared casually one summer
day to open negotiations of marriage. He sat with the chief in the smoke
of a mosqu