Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/424

422 and French curses, and sprang in among them with his dog-whip as the loafing pack of huskies, mongrels and malemutes fell on them in that close, grim welcome which means all the blood and death their masters will allow.

Dick watched the man in the midst of them with appreciative interest. He had all the spring and the verve and the diabolical absence of fear which belongs to the best class of trapper, and his rakish clothes, his earrings, and the gay trappings of his sled proclaimed him as one of the dandies of the North. He freed his team at last; unharnessed them, and let them go back to their battle.

"Que voulez-vous!" he said, shrugging his shoulders as he caught Dick's eye. "They will have it."

"There are more than the giddes will have it at times, eh?" said Dick.

"Dame," said the Frenchman, and laughed with his black eyes snapping. "It is a true word, that."

Outside the Store a team of Labrador dogs lay in the lines. They were motionless; but the prick of their ears and the occasional snarl baring the white teeth told their nature. Death was the one foe to whom the dogs of the Labrador consented to strike their flag. The office at the end of the Store was packed with men. The approaches to the sheds were a tangle of emptying sleds and quarrelling dogs; of Indians and breeds and Frenchmen, and an occasional whiter-skinned man of the South. Dick passed them by to the tepees already rising like a little forest along the outskirts. For many of the trappers yearly take their families to the woods and the home of those families is wherever the tepee rises.

It was here that Dick hoped to glean some information concerning Andree. If she had gone to Chipewyan with the Indians she had possibly gone to the woods with them too. He did not believe that she would come back to Chipewyan. The cunning of the forest was in her as it was in himself. But he might get a clue. He lifted the flap of the first tepee and looked in. It was dark after the glare of the sun, and a strong smell of musk from the musk-robes pervaded it. Something chuckled out of the dark as a child chuckles over the thing it plays with;