de, with eyes on all that treasure of the North which
lies between the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca and the edge of the
polar sea. But still more beautiful than the dream of fortunes quickly
made is the deep-forest superstition that the spirits of the wilderness
dead move onward as steam and steel advance, and if this is so, the
ghosts of a thousand Pierres and Jacquelines have risen uneasily from
their graves at Athabasca Landing, hunting a new quiet farther north.

For it was Pierre and Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his
Jeanne, whose brown hands for a hundred and forty years opened and
closed this door. And those hands still master a savage world for two
thousand miles north of that threshold of Athabasca Landing. South of
it a wheezy engine drags up the freight that came not so many months
ago by boat.

It is over this threshold that the dark eyes of Pierre and Jacqueline,
Henri and Marie, Jacques and his Jeanne, look into the blue and the
gray and the sometimes watery ones of a destroying civilization. And
there it is that the shriek of a mad locomotive mingles with their
age-old river chants; the smut of coal drifts over their forests; the
phonograph screeches its reply to _le violon_; and Pierre and Henri and
Jacques no longer find themselves the kings of the earth when they come
in from far countries with their precious cargoes of furs. And they no
longer swagger and tell loud-voiced adventure, or sing their wild river
songs in the same old abandon, for there are streets at Athabasca
Landing now, and hotels, and schools, and rules and regulations of a
kind new and terrifying to the bold of the old _voyageurs_.

It seems only yesterday that the railroad was not there, and a great
world of wilderness lay between the Landing and the upper rim of
civilization. And when word first came that a steam thing was eating
its way up foot by foot through forest and swamp and impassable muskeg,
that word passed up and down the water-ways for two thousand miles, a
colossal joke, a stupendous bit of drollery, the funniest thing that
Pierre and Henri and Jacques had heard in all their lives. And when
Jacques wanted to impress upon Pierre his utter disbelief of a thing,
he would say:

"It will happen, m'sieu, when the steam thing comes to the Landing,
when cow-beasts eat with the moose, and when our bread is found for us
in yonder swamps!"

And the steam thing came, and cows grazed where moose had fed, and
bread