of the Esquimos began to arrive from the coast,
packed with tousle-headed children and the priceless sled-dogs, taking
Fleur, Jean sought out his old friend Kovik of the Big Salmon. As he
approached the skin lodge on the beach, beside which the kin of Fleur
were made fast to prevent promiscuous fighting with strange dogs, she
answered their surly greeting with so stiff a mane, so fierce a show of
fangs, that Jean pulled her away by her rawhide leash, lest her
reputation suffer further by adding fratricide to her crimes.

Playmates of her puppyhood, mother who suckled her, she had forgotten
utterly; vanished was all memory of her kin. She held but one
allegiance, one love; the love approaching idolatry she bore the young
master who had taken her in that far country from the strange men who
beat her with clubs; who had brought her north again through wintry
seas; who had companioned her through the long snows and in the dread
days of the famine had shared with her his last meat. The center and sum
of her existence was Jean Marcel. All other living things were as
nothing.

"Kekway!" cried the squat pair of Huskies, delighted at the appearance
of the man who had given them back their first born. "Kekway!" chuckled
a half-dozen round-faced children, shaking Jean's hand in turn.

"Huh!" grunted the father, his eyes wide with wonder at the sight of
Fleur, ears flat, muttering dire threats at her yelping brethren
straining at their stakes, "dat good dog!"

"Oui, she good dog," agreed Jean. "Soon I have dog-team lak Husky!"

Shifting a critical eye from Fleur to his own dogs the Esquimo nodded.

"Ha! Ha! You ketch boy in water, you get bes' dog."

The Esquimo had not erred in his judgment of puppies. He had indeed
given the man who had cheated the Big Salmon of his son the best of the
litter. At sixteen months, Fleur stood inches higher at the shoulder
and weighed twenty pounds more than her brothers. Truly, with the speed
and stamina of their sire, the timber wolf, coupled with Fleur's courage
and power, these puppies, whose advent he awaited, should make a
dog-team unrivalled on the East Coast.

"Cree up dere," continued the Esquimo, pointing toward the post
clearing, "say de dog keel man."

Marcel nodded gravely. "Oui, man try kill me, she kill heem."

"Huh! De ol' dog keel bad Husky, on Kogaluk one tam."

Fleur indeed had come from a fighting strain--dogs that would battle to
the death or toil in the traces unti