or'wester on the Saskatchewan.

Sick to the very bottom of his heart, he bowed ever so slightly to the
tense figure on the step and strode away in the shadows.

So! Thus ended his one love.

For this he had kept himself from the common lot of the factors in their
lonely posts; for this he had never looked with aught save friendly
compassion upon the maids of the settlements, the half breed girls of
the wilderness, the wild daughters of the forest.

Waiting for this one princess in his small kingdom, he had thrown
himself on the out-bearing tide of love only to be stranded on some
barren beach, to see her taken from him by some reckless courtier not
fit to touch a woman's hand!

Thus they turned apart, these two meant for each other from the
beginning, and in each love worked its will of pain.

Maren on the step stared dry-eyed into the night, uncomprehending,
unrebelling, and McElroy strode ahead, blind with sudden anguish, scarce
knowing which way his steps tended.

And, like a ghoul behind a stone, a small dark face peeped keenly from a
corner.

Francette was watching her leaven work.

CHAPTER XII THE NAKONKIRHIRINONS

In the week that followed the waters of the Assiniboine grew black with
myriads of canoes. Like the leaves in fall, truly, they came drifting
out of the forest, long slim craft, made with a wondrous cunning of
birchbark peeled from the tree in one piece, fitted to frames of ash
fragile as cockleshell and strong as steel under the practised hand, and
smeared in every crinkle and crease and crevasse with the resinous gum
of the pine tree. By scores and hundreds and battalions, it seemed to
the traders at De Seviere, they poured out of the wilderness, choking
the river with their numbers, spilling their contents on the slope under
the bastioned walls until a camp was made so vast that it stretched into
the forest on each side the clearing of the post and even extended to
the marsh at the south.

Half-naked braves stalked in countless numbers among the tepees that
went rapidly up, tall fellows, mighty of build and fearless of carriage
and of eagle eye, aloof, suspicious, watching the fort, guarding the
rich piles of peltry and exchanging a word with none.

These were the great Nakonkirhirinons from that limitless region of the
Pays Ten d'en Haut.

If McElroy's heart had not been so full of his own trouble he would have
exulted mightily in their coming, for did it not prove one failure fo