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152 a river-steamer comes to anchor. Two hours later the captain, coming aboard, trod on that man where he stretched unlawfully into the passage-way. But he showed no surprise when Dick sat up and asked for a passage so far as she chose to go. Bessait listened in silence. Small curiosities do not fit with a thousand-mile landscape, and the talk of the great rivers make the human voice sound thin. Then he made reply in one grave nod and went on deck.

Dick proceeded with his toilet in a lazy content. Haste was over for the time, and at leisure he made his investigations.

The crew were as mixed a draft as Bessait usually carried. French breeds with the strength of ten; a remittance man gone sufficiently insane to cook junk and dried moose and tinned meats and fresh fish month in and month out for a clamorous multitude; a stoker with an unnecessary certificate, who was engineer and greaser and everything else; an Englishman with suggestive holes cut in his clothes corners as though some name had been blotted out; a few quiet, firm-lipped Canadians, Fraser's young son, and a delicate-limbed, fine-faced boy-student from McGill University, who did what he was told for the sake of learning life in his holidays.

Dick yawned and went aft among the carefully-stacked barrels, boxes, cases, bacon in sacks, harness, bales of clothes, seasoned timber, bags of sealed mail, and many things more which Bessait was taking north addressed to men whom the world "outside" had forgotten long since. On a bale sat a French priest with biretta and breviary. The stamp of an old-world monastery was raw on him, and Dick wondered idly what kind of work this man would make of life among the realities. Then he pushed open the door of the half-moon glass-sided saloon where a handful of men were playing poker at this nine of a summer and looked in.

Brodribb, the Hudson Bay factor from Fort Smith, saw him first, and gave welcome. Ducane twisted in his chair; went white, and gripped the table-edge. Robison made the cards in great hairy hands that did not shake, and Dick's heart approved him. For Robison would never