he toiled
north. His mind was centered on Charley Seguis, the Indian, the
man who must be conquered. There lay his duty; hazardous, fatal,
perhaps; but still his duty. It was the first law of the company
that justice should be infallible among its servants, and right
triumphant.

Donald crossed the tracks of two hunters that morning, but saw no
one. By this time, he was well into the Beaver Lake district.
Seventy-five miles north were the low, desolate shores of Hudson
Bay, and as many miles directly east lay Fort Severn. At the thought,
a short spasm of pain clutched his heart, for he could not forget
that the lonely post contained the world for him.

The splendors and luxuries of civilization in great cities were as
nothing to him now. Only the vast wild, and this one wonderful
creature of the wild, Jean Fitzpatrick, spoke to him in a language
that he understood. He had vague recollections of operas and theaters
and dances, and all the colorful life of Montreal and Winnipeg;
but they only stirred within him a sense of imprisonment and unrest.

"Better to fight and die alone in the deep woods than to live all
one's life as a jellyfish," was the concise fashion in which he
summed the matter up.

At two o'clock that afternoon McTavish consulted a map he had made
of the district near Fort Dickey, and laid his course for the
trapping shanty of an Indian called Whiskey Bill. It was on the
bank of a little beaver stream that debouched into Beaver River.
The stream was frozen to a thickness of three feet, and Donald
drove his dog team smartly down the snow-covered ice, riding on
the sledge for the first time in many hours. But he finally arrived
at Whiskey Bill's shanty only to find the place deserted, and the
little building slowly disintegrating under the investigations of
animals.

"That's funny," thought Donald uncertainly. "I can't understand it
at all. He said he was coming in to his old shanty on this fork of
the Beaver when the fall trapping began."

He closely examined the rickety structure. It showed signs of having
been inhabited up to a month previous. The woodsman shook his head
in uncertain amazement, and again consulted his map. Ten miles
father east, on the north shore of Beaver Lake, lived a Frenchman
named Voudrin.

McTavish cracked his whip over the dogs' backs, and, leaping on
the sledge as it passed, shot down the river to the big lake. But
there, after a swift trip of an hour and a half, he fo