devoting one's
life to a friend or to a duty, real or fancied, is only a trifle to
these men who abide in the wilderness. I know of a Chinaman and a Cree
who lived and died the most devoted friends. You see the Missourian
hovering about the last camping-place of his companion. Behold the
factor! He has left the Hudson Bay Company after thirty years because he
has lost his life's best friend, a man who spoke another language, whose
religion was not the brand upon which the factor had been brought up in
England; yet they were friends."

The camp fire had gone out. In the south we saw the first faint flush
of dawn as Cromwell, knocking the ashes from his pipe, advised me to go
to bed. "You get the old factor to tell you the story of his friend the
cure, and of the cure's Christmas gift," Cromwell called back, and I
made a point of getting the story, bit by bit, from the florid factor
himself, and you shall read it as it has lingered in my memory.

When the new cure came to Chinook on the Upper Peace River, he carried a
small hand-satchel, his blankets, and a crucifix. His face was drawn,
his eyes hungry, his frame wasted, but his smile was the smile of a man
at peace with the world. The West--the vast, undiscovered Canadian
West--jarred on the sensitive nerves of this Paris-bred priest. And yet,
when he crossed the line that marks what we are pleased to call
"civilization," and had reached the heart of the real Northwest, where
the people were unspoiled, natural, and honest, where a handful of Royal
Northwest Mounted Police kept order in an empire that covers a quarter
of a continent, he became deeply interested in this new world, in the
people, in the imperial prairies, the mountains, and the great wide
rivers that were racing down to the northern sea.

The factor at the Hudson's Bay post, whose whole life since he had left
college in England had been passed on the Peace River, at York Factory,
and other far northern stations over which waved the Hudson's Bay
banner, warmed to the new cure from their first meeting, and the cure
warmed to him. Each seemed to find in the other a companion that neither
had been able to find among the few friends of his own faith.

And so, through the long evenings of the northern winter, they sat in
the cure's cabin study or by the factor's fire, and talked of the things
which they found interesting, including politics, literature, art, and
Indians. Despite the great gulf that rolled bet