imagination could make true. Something of the old atmosphere had gone,
and there was a stir and a murmur in all the West which broke that grim
yet fascinating loneliness of the time of Pierre.

Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different style
from that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as for
instance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man's River, The
Stroke of the Hour, Qu'appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, and
something of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incident
of the earlier stories appears. I believe I did well--at any rate for
myself and my purposes--in writing this book, and thus making the human
narrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of the
sixties onwards. So have I assured myself of the rightness of my
intention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry on
this human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of the
present, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills and
factories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, and
when hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across the
plains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in their
millions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.

NOTE

The tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of the
Far West. The first five are reminiscent of "border days and deeds"--of
days before the great railway was built which changed a waste into a
fertile field of civilisation. The remaining stories cover the period
passed since the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Pullman car
first startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of the
farther North, or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine and
humdrum occupation.

G. P.

A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS

"Hai--Yai, so bright a day, so clear!" said Mitiahwe as she entered the
big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the
fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man's rifle. "Hai-yai, I
wish it would last for ever--so sweet!" she added, smoothing the fur
lingeringly, and showing her teeth in a smile.

"There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe. See, the birds go south so
soon," responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.

The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant fantastic
mood--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the trag