ng before the big fire. The next morning the boys slept
late and when they responded to Philip's persistent call to breakfast,
they found that Chandler had eaten and gone. Colonel Howell was awaiting
the boys, Ewen and Miller being already at work on the blazing well, and
he seemed to have something on his mind.

"Would there be any great danger," he began at once, addressing Norman,
"in making a short flight in your airship in weather like this?"

"This isn't bad," volunteered Roy. "It's only a few degrees below zero.
There's a good fall of snow for our runners and there hasn't been any
wind since the blizzard."

"Well," resumed Colonel Howell, almost meditatively, "it seems a shame
for us to be livin' here in what you might call luxury and folks starving
all around us. Look at this," he went on, and he led the three boys near
one of the windows where a large Department of the Interior map of
northern Alberta was tacked to the wall. "Here's Fort McMurray and our
camp," he began, pointing to a black spot on the almost uncharted white,
where the McMurray River emptied into the Athabasca. Then he ran his
finger northward along the wide blue line indicating the tortuous course
of the Athabasca past Fort McKay and the Indian settlement described as
Pierre au Calumet (marked "abandoned"), past the Muskeg, the Firebag and
the Moose Rivers where they found their way into the giant Athabasca
between innumerable black spots designated as "tar" islands, and at last
stopped suddenly at the words "Pointe aux Tremble."

"That's an Indian town," went on Colonel Howell, "and it's about as far
south as you ever find the Chipewyans. It isn't much over a hundred miles
from here and Chandler says there ain't a man left in the village. Pretty
soon, he thinks, there'll be no women and children left. Maybe he's
making a pretty black picture but he says all the men have gone over
toward the lake hunting. They've been gone over two weeks and the camp
was starving when they left."

The colonel, with a peculiar look on his face, led the way back to the
breakfast table.

"These Indians are nothing to me," he went on at last, "and all Indians
are starving pretty much all the time, but they die just the same. But
somehow, with plenty of pork and flour here and this great invention here
right at hand from which nobody's benefitting, it seems to me we must be
pretty hard-hearted to sit in comfort, stuffing ourselves, while little
babies are dyi