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Rh betrayed his work. A woman, a girl with shaking hands and the exhaustion of utter grief on her, had beaten him; had broken his will, and stripped his defiance from him, and sent him away. And he had gone. He could not discover why he had gone, and why he knew that he could not go back. He knew only that Jennifer's will was not equal to the steel of his will, and that therefore it was a power behind and beyond her which had struck at him through her. He had refused to acknowledge or obey that Power. But he had been forced to acknowledge it on Beverley Lake, and now he was forced to obey it. And this galled him and enraged him, and poisoned the call of the North in him, day by day.

Though near the verge of breaking, the ice held still when he drove into Chipewyan some days later. But the long, straight-laid street was dirty with trampled mush and noisy with much shouting of men and snapping of the long caribou-gut whips and the fighting of loosened dog packs. The fur-hunters of the North were bringing their winter's yield into the big Hudson Bay sheds at old Chipewyan, and there was no one in the settlement who did not know it. To-day the Hudson Bay Company was king of the North as it was in the golden days of its reign, nearly three hundred years ago. From out of unnumbered solitary places the trappers came to do honour to it; deep-eyed, alert men, with that hip-rolling walk which is born of the snow-shoe and those sudden spurts into ungoverned merriment which are in the blood of the French-Indian breed.

Dick left his team at the barracks and walked down to the Hudson Bay Store. Forsyth was away until the evening, and Dick was glad. He had no desire to answer all the questions which Forsyth would ask, although he had one arrow ready sharpened for the complacent Sergeant. Here were men from the Barren Grounds with their fierce little Eskimo teams pulling sleds piled with musk-ox and caribou-skins. Here was a hollow-cheeked Indian with his mangy mongrels staggering under the weight of a half-filled little sled of wolverine and mink and fox. A French-Canadian flogged his big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds past at a gallop; halted them with many screams