tude,
half-sitting, half-reclining among the cushions on a low couch of red
fox skins. But while he told tales of the country to the interested
Boreland, his narrow eyes watched the play of the firelight on the
softly-massed golden-brown hair of Ellen, Boreland's wife, who sat
knitting in the glow.

Life, for the trader, had taken on a new zest this past week. Long
years of acting a part--the part of a great white chief, mysterious,
all knowing, all powerful in the eyes of the simple natives of the
North, had made him fully alive to the dramatic possibilities of
playing host at Katleean, and he was not unaware of his own
semi-barbaric attractiveness in these surroundings.

It had been easy to induce Shane Boreland, for the sake of his wife and
young sister-in-law, to spend a few weeks in the quarters back of the
store, where they were ministered to by the silent, dark-eyed women
whose status they did not understand.

The trader's heart was stirred with interest and expectancy. Here at
last was an auditor worthy of his best efforts--a white woman, not too
young, fair-faced and gentle, yet with the courage to follow her man
into the wilds of a new country. A woman, who, he had learned, could
unfailingly put a shot in a bull's eye at twenty paces and handle an
oar in a small boat, yet a woman who could look sweetly domestic as she
knitted on a garment for her small son. To Paul Kilbuck, as to all
domineering men who scoff at matrimony, there was something
irresistibly appealing in the "sweetly domestic" woman, something
suggestive of that oldest occupation of woman--the business of
ministering to man's physical and temperamental needs, the duty of
making his body and his egotism comfortable. He watched her in covert
approval.

How soft and white her throat appeared above the open neck of her
blouse--soft and white with a tiny hollow at the base where a man might
leave kisses--or the print of his teeth. What little hands she had,
white with nails of rosy pink. Little white hands! The words kept
singing through his consciousness. So long had brown hands done his
bidding up here in the North that he had nearly forgotten that a
woman's skin could be so white! To have those little white hands just
once, softly feeling, caressing, losing themselves in the blackness of
his beard----

The White Chief sat bolt upright to shake off the mad-sweet pang that
had thrilled him. The voice of Boreland brought him back fr