They carried the unconscious girl into the dim-lighted apartment of the curtained windows, and laid her on the divan. Wishkobun, hastily summoned, unfastened the girl's dress at the throat.

"It is a faint," she announced in her own tongue. "She will recover in a few minutes; I will get some water."

Ned Trent wiped the moisture from his forehead with his handkerchief. The danger he had undergone coolly, but this overcame his iron self-control. Galen Albret, like an anxious bear, weaved back and forth the length of the couch. In him the rumble of the storm was but just echoing into distance.

"Go into the next room," he growled at the Free Trader, when finally he noticed the latter's presence.

Ned Trent hesitated.

"Go, I say!" snarled the Factor. "You can do nothing here." He followed the young man to the door, which he closed with his own hand, and then turned back to the couch on which his daughter lay. In the middle of the floor his foot clicked on some small object. Mechanically he picked it up.

It proved to be a little silver match-safe of the sort universally used in the Far North. Evidently the Free Trader had flipped it from his pocket with his handkerchief. The Factor was about to thrust it into his own pocket, when his eye caught lettering roughly carved across one side. Still mechanically, he examined it more closely. The lettering was that of a man's name. The man's name was Graehme Stewart.

Without thinking of what he did, he dropped the object on the small table, and returned anxiously to the girl's side, cursing the tardiness of the Indian woman. But in a moment Wishkobun returned.

"Will she recover?" asked the Factor, distracted at the woman's deliberate examination.

The latter smiled her indulgent, slow smile. "But surely," she assured him in her own tongue, "it is no more than if she cut her finger. In a few breaths she will recover. Now I will go to the house of the Cockburn for a morsel of the sweet wood[A] which she must smell." She looked her inquiry for permission.

[Footnote A: Camphor.]

"Sagaamig--go," assented Albret.

Relieved in mind, he dropped into a chair. His eye caught the little silver match-safe. He picked it up and fell to staring at the rudely carved letters.

He found that he was alone with his daughter--and the thoughts aroused by the dozen letters of a man's name.

All his life long he had been a hard man. His commands had been autocratic; his anger formidable; his punishments severe, and sometimes cruel. The quality of mercy was with him tenuous and weak. He knew this, and if he did not exactly glory in it, he was at least indifferent to its effect on his reputation with others. But always he had been just. The victims of his displeasure might complain that his retributive measures were harsh, that his forgiveness could not be evoked by even the most extenuating of circumstances, but not that his anger had ever been baseless or the punishment undeserved. Thus he had held always his own self-respect, and from his self-respect had proceeded his iron and effective rule.

So in the case of the young man with whom now his thoughts were occupied. Twice he had warned him from the country without the punishment which the third attempt rendered imperative. The events succeeding his arrival at Conjuror's House warmed the Factor's anger to the heat of almost preposterous retribution perhaps--for after all a man's life is worth something, even in the wilds--but it was actually retribution, and not merely a ruthless proof of power. It might be justice as only the Factor saw it, but it was still essentially justice--in the broader sense that to each act had followed a definite consequence. Although another might have condemned his conduct as unnecessarily harsh, Galen Albret's conscience was satisfied and at rest.

Nor had his resolution been permanently affected by either the girl's threat to make away with herself or by his momentary softening when she had fainted. The affair was thereby complicated, but that was all. In the sincerity of the threat he recognized his own iron nature, and was perhaps a little pleased at its manifestation. He knew she intended to fulfil her promise not to survive her lover, but at the moment this did not reach his fears; it only aroused further his dogged opposition.

The Free Trader's speech as he left the room, however, had touched the one flaw in Galen Albret's confidence of righteousness. Wearied with the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his brain numbed, his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated himself and contemplated the images those two words had called up.

Graehme Stewart! That man he had first met at Fort Rae over twenty years ago. It was but just after he had married Virginia's mother. At once his imagination, with the keen pictorial power of those who have dwelt long in the Silent Places, brought forward the other scene--that of his wooing. He had driven his dogs into Fort la Cloche after a hard day's run in seventy-five degrees of frost. Weary, hungry, half-frozen, he had staggered into the fire-lit room. Against the blaze he had caught for a moment a young girl's profile, lost as she turned her face toward him in startled question of his entrance. Men had cared for his dogs. The girl had brought him hot tea. In the corner of the fire they two had whispered one to the other--the already grizzled traveller of the silent land, the fresh, brave north-maiden. At midnight, their parkas drawn close about their faces in the fearful cold, they had met outside the inclosure of the Post. An hour later they were away under the aurora for Qu'Apelle. Galen Albret's nostrils expanded as he heard the _crack, crack, crack_ of the remorseless dog-whip whose sting drew him away from the vain pursuit. After the marriage at Qu'Apelle they had gone a weary journey to Rae, and there he had first seen Graehme Stewart.

Fort Rae is on the northwestward arm of the Great Slave Lake in the country of the Dog Ribs, only four degrees under the Arctic Circle. It is a dreary spot, for the Barren Grounds are near. Men see only the great lake, the great sky, the great gray country. They become moody, fanciful. In the face of the silence they have little to say. At Fort Rae were old Jock Wilson, the Chief Trader; Father Bonat, the priest; Andrew Levoy, the _metis_ clerk; four Dog Rib teepees; Galen Albret and his bride; and Graehme Stewart.

Jock Wilson was sixty-five; Father Bonat had no age; Andrew Levoy possessed the years of dour silence. Only Graehme Stewart and Elodie, bride of Albret, were young. In the great gray country their lives were like spots of color on a mist. Galen Albret finally became jealous.

At first there was nothing to be done; but finally Levoy brought to the older man proof............