es of devotion and sacrifice beside which
mere patriotism would seem a little thing. Men who had no country
cleaved to her desolate posts, her lakes and rivers and forests; men
who had no home ties felt the tug of her wild life at their hearts;
men who had no God bowed in awe before her power and grandeur. The
Company was a living thing.

"Rivals attempted her supremacy, and were defeated by the
steadfastness of the men who received her meagre wages and looked to
her as their one ideal. Her explorers were the bravest, her traders
the most enterprising and single-minded, her factors and partners the
most capable and potent in all the world. No country, no leader, no
State ever received half the worship her sons gave her. The fierce
Nor'westers, the traders of Montreal, the Company of the X Y, Astor
himself, had to give way. For, although they were bold or reckless or
crafty or able, they had not the ideal which raises such qualities to
invincibility.

"And, little girl, nothing is wrong to men who have such an ideal
before them. They see but one thing, and all means are good that help
them to assure that one thing. They front the dangers, they overcome
the hardships, they crush the rivals. Bloody wars have taken place in
these forests, ruthless deeds have been done, but the men who
accomplished them held the deeds good. So for two hundred years, aided
by the charter from the king, they have made good their undisputed
right.

"Then the railroad entered the west. The charter of monopoly ran out.
Through the Nipissing, the Athabasca, the Edmonton, came the Free
Traders--men who traded independently. These the Company could not
control, so it competed--and to its credit its competition has held
its own. Even far into the Northwest, where the trails are long, the
Free Traders have established their chains of supplies, entering into
rivalry with the Company for a barter it has always considered its
right. The medicine has been bitter, but the servants of the Company
have adjusted themselves to the new conditions, and are holding their
own.

"But one region still remains cut off from the outside world by a
broad band of unexplored waste. The life here at Hudson's
Bay--although you may not know it--is exactly the same to-day that it
was two hundred years ago. And here the Company makes its stand for a
monopoly.

"At first it worked openly. But in the case of Guillaume Sayer, a
daring and pugnacious _metis_, it got into t