ing no inconsiderable protection against the weather.
Inside the lodge, bales of goods and packages of provisions were quickly
arranged in comfortable fashion. Gaudy blankets were spread upon layers
of soft skins of the buffalo. The Indian woman had meantime struck a
fire, whose faint blue smoke curled lakeward in the soft evening air.
Quickly, and with the system of experienced campaigners, the evening
bivouac had been prepared; and wildly picturesque it must have seemed
to a bystander, had there been indeed any possible spectator within many
leagues.

Far enough was this from the turmoil of London, which Law and his
companion had left nearly a year before; far enough still from the wild
capital of New France, where they had spent the winter, after landing,
as much by chance as through any plan, at the port of the St. Lawrence.
Ever a demon of unrest drove Law forward; ever there beckoned to him
that irresistible West, of which he was one of the earliest to feel the
charm. Farther and farther westward, swift and swifter than ever the
boats of the fur traders had made the journey before, he and his party,
led by Du Mesne, the ex-galley-slave and wanderer whom Law had by chance
met again, and gladly, at Montreal, had made the long and dangerous run
up the lakes, past Michilimackinac, down the lake of Michiganon, headed
toward the interior of a new continent which was then, as for
generations after then, the land of wondrous distances, of grand
enterprises, of magnificent promises and immense fulfilments. The bales
and bundles of this bivouac belonged to John Law, bought by gold from
the gaming tables of Montreal and Quebec, and ventured in the one great
hazard which appealed to him most irresistibly, the hazard of life and
fortune in a far land, where he might live unneighbored, and where he
might forget. Gambler in England, gambler again in New France, now
trading fur-merchant and _voyageur_, he was, as always, an adventurer.
Du Mesne and his hardy crew hailed him already as a new captain of the
trails, a new _coureur_, won from the Old World by the savage witchery
of the New. He was their brother; and had he indeed owned longer years
of training, his keenness of eye, his strength of arm, his tirelessness
of limb could hardly have been greater than they seemed in his first
voyage to the West.

"_Tous les printemps,
Tant des nouvelles_"

hummed Du Mesne, as he busied himself about the camp, casting the whil