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324 He made the introductions briefly as Tempest came up, then turned to his work again. And from where he lay by the tent with his hat pulled over his eyes and his pipe going fiercely to free him of the mosquitoes, Dick watched this scene which had been so familiar to him in other days: on the Little Slave River; on the Peace; at Vermilion, and which never grew stale. For it was colour and movement, tragedy and comedy. It was Life.

He lifted on his elbow; dragged out his sketch-book, and roughed in the picture with a charcoal stub. And it was a picture worth while to the man who could see.

Back of all lay the broad blue line of the lake that lipped the sandy beach. Then the dirty brown, close-set jumble of tepees half-hid by smoke that lifted sometimes to show the white houses of the Fort beyond. The medley of children and dogs that rolled, laughing and yapping, round the tents. The fathers and mothers of the race, crowding round the Treaty-Payer; pure Mongolian type, some with eager, slant-eyes for the "sooneyahs" which Gillington was dealing; erect, dignified chiefs who ask help of the white man against none but the white man and who manipulate their family quarrels in private; ill-made derelicts, hauling their loose store-clothes tighter round their unwashed bodies, and looked on with disfavour by the sturdier Dog-legs. And foremost of all, the little group of white men: Gillington straddled on his box, with his shirt loose at the thick throat and the sweat dripping from him as he flung his jokes and genial encouragements to the mercy of Francois' interpretation, seeing in answer the white of eyes and teeth flashing out suddenly with a coarsely-humorous retort; the slim, gentlemanly Otway, with the furtive eyes which told, while they believed they hid, the reason which had brought him so far from the land and the class which bred him; Sherwood, the big-boned, merry-eyed doctor, who carried his lonely beat over a good-sized section of a half-continent—Tempest.

Dick smudged them in; longing for his paints to dab on the raw vermilion of that Cree's waist-scarf, or the saffron tempered by dirt of that woman's shawl. Or the blue of the lake, and the warm umbers of the tepees, and the pure ash-grey of a dog that scratched itself at Tempest's feet.