s them,
and he sits them down in a highly decisive manner, only to find that
Bill, and Jean Baptiste, and One-eyed Pete have gone up town for a
dunnage bag they left at the Grand Union Hotel.... The Boss looks
eight feet tall when he is angry, but, otherwise, to the unseeing eye,
he is only a young factor, or maybe an independent trader, intent on
his work like scores of other ordinary, unaccounted workmen.
Contrawise, the eye of imagination may see in him an adventuring
gentleman launching a craft that is to traverse for hundreds of miles
through many and diverse waterways, carrying with it a veritable cargo
of blessings to the far and lonely outposts of the North which, as yet,
are little else than names.

The rivermen push off from shore with their oars till, in the centre of
the stream, the current catches them and carries them along. This is
their only method of locomotion, to float and float with the stream.
They have a steering-pole in the scow similar to that which may be seen
in pictures of old Roman galleys, and when, because of darkness, the
voyageurs wish to stay their course, they make to shore by its aid,
even as the Romans did more than two thousand years ago. To make the
simile complete, I stand on the bank and repeat the invocation of the
Roman poet: "Oh ship that conveyest Virgil to Greece, duly deliver up
the precious life entrusted to thy care."...

If I hadn't jerked the crown of an old hat out of the river under the
impression that it was a fish, Justine would not have laughed out loud
and I would not have had an excuse to get acquainted with her. She has
been sitting nearby this half-hour. Her name isn't really Justine and
I forget what it is. She is the prettiest breed-girl in the country
and, by the same token, the frailest. "Believe me, Madam," explained
an old officer of the Mounted Police, the other day, "those eyes were
never given her for the good of her soul. She is a little
worth-nothing person like all the other breed-girls."

This man despises breed-women and he has made a sufficiently intimate
study of them to form an opinion. He wishes they were all dead. "For
an absolute truth, Madam, listen to me. For years, these women have
paddled their canoes up this river with kegs of contraband liquor
a-swing from ropes beneath and none of the force ever suspected. They
were so monstrously civil, they would even give us 'a lift' if we
desired it. I was highly surprised when we f