in returned.

"Nay," she said gently, "fret not. It is spring-and you have at last a
home."

True, it was spring.

Did not each breath of the south wind tell it, each flute-like call
from the budding forest without the post, each burst of song from some
hot-blooded youth with his red cap perched on the back of his head, his
gay sash knotted jauntily?

It stirred the heart in the breast of Maren Le Moyne, but not with the
thought of love. It called to her as she stood at night alone under the
stars, with her head lifted as if to drink the keen, sweet darkness;
called to her from far-distant plains of blowing grass, virgin of man's
foot; from rushing rivers, bare of canoe and raft; from high hills,
smiling, sweet and fair, up to the cloudless sky--and always it called
from the West.

Spring was here and cast its largess at her feet,--fate held back her
eager hand.

A year she must wait, a year in which to win those necessaries of the
long trail, without which all would fail.

Travel, even by so primitive a method as canoe and foot, must demand its
toll of salvage.

At Rainy Lake they had been held by thieving Indians and a great part
of their provisions taken from them, leaving them to make their way in
comparative poverty to the next post of De Seviere.

Further progress that year was impossible. Therefore, the contract of
the trappers with the factor.

And Maren Le Moyne--venturer of the venturers, flame of fire among them,
urger, inspirer, and moral leader, a living pillar before them in her
eagerness--must needs curb her soul in bonds of patience and wait at
Fort de Seviere for another spring.

Close beside her in her visions and her high hope, her courage and her
eagerness, stood that leader of the little band, Prix Laroux. Fed by
her fire, touched by her enthusiasm, the man was the mouth piece for the
woman's force, the masculine expression of that undying hope of conquest
which had drawn the small party together and set it forth on the
perilous venture of pushing toward the unknown West to find for itself
an ideal holding.

Back at Grand Portage the girl had listened from her late childhood
to tales of the wilderness told at her father's cabin by voyageurs
and trappers, by returning wanderers and stray Indians smoking the
peace-pipe at his hearth. Long before she had reached the stature of
woman she had sat on her stool beside that jovial old man, her father,
grimy from his forge, and drunk the tal