d in terror, leaving him
alone in the silence. In the unpeopled solitude of the long dark
winter days and nights which had followed, he had grown strangely
curious as to the welfare of his soul, and had petitioned God that it
might be disembodied so that he might gaze upon it with his living
eyes. After a week of continuous prayer, he had fastened on his
snowshoes, and gone out upon the ice to seek God's sign. He had not
travelled far before he had come to the mound where his six companions
lay buried. There against the dusky sky-line he had seen a famished
wolf standing over a scooped-out grave. So the factor had had his
sign, and had looked upon his disembodied soul with his own eyes.

When the ice broke up and the first canoe of half-breed voyageurs
swept up to the fort, they had been met by a man who crawled upon
hands and knees, and snarled like a husky or a coyote.

Granger shrugged his shoulders and shuddered. He thanked his God that
the spring was near by. Upon one thing he was determined, that
whatever happened, though he should have to die--by his own hand, he
would not grovel into Eternity upon his hands and knees as had that
factor of the Hudson Bay.

For relief from the turbulence of his thoughts he turned his attention
to the frozen quiet of the world without. Not a feature in the
landscape had changed throughout all the past five months. He had
nothing new to learn about it: he had even committed to memory where
each separate shadow would fall at each particular hour of the day.
Straight out of the west the river ran so far as eye could reach,
until it came to Murder Point. At close of day it seemed a molten
pathway which led, without a waver, from Granger's store directly to
the heart of the sun. Having arrived at the Point, the Last Chance
River swept round to the northeast, and then to the north, until in
many curves it poured its waters into the distant Hudson Bay. Its
banks, in the open season, which lasted from May to October, were low
and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren
lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted
growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch.
The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from
its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the
closeness of its underbrush. There were places within three miles of
Murder Point where a white man had never travelled, and