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Rh ice crisped sometimes as he drove his canoe in among the reeds to shoot mallard or merganser for his supper. The days were shortening rapidly; but wild-flowers still bloomed among the grasses when he left the Mackenzie and turned op the Peel River to Fort Macpherson. Two days before he had found a drowned Indian caught in a snag and had towed him ashore and buried him. For a moment he had stood by the shallow grave scooped in the sand and stared down on the dead face before he covered it with an aching desire to know what was the use of it all; of all the short, sharp days of man's life that pass so swiftly; of all the long eternities of nothingness that come after.

His first evening at Macpherson gave him more comfort than he had known for many days. In Corporal Hensham's little warm private room, with the big black stove-pipe running through it, he smoked pipe after pipe among the pictures on the walls and the well-worn books on the shelves. Dumb-bells and Indian clubs filled the corners, for Hensham was an athletic and enthusiastic Canadian with all the energy of youth in him yet.

"I'm off on a mountain patrol the end of the week," he said; "but I can take you out to the Fishing Lakes to-morrow, and you'll likely get some information there. The Indians are thick around it, getting their fish out before the ice. They are principally Loucheux; a very decent lot, and I can let you have an interpreter. What's the girl like? Nearly white, you say."

Dick reached a sheet of brown, wrapping paper from under the table, and picked up a bit of chalk which Hensham had been using, to keep a quoit tally with.

"I'll try to give you some idea," he said; and rapidly roughed in the tall, breezy outline, the curve of the cheek and chin, and the carriage of the small curly head. It moved him more than he cared to allow as Grange's Andree sprang into life under his hand, and he tossed the sheet across to Hensham in sudden irritation.

"That is an amateur attempt," he said dryly. "Her Maker has done the thing rather better."

"Oh, I say!" Hensham was startled. "Why; she's a beauty. And you're a don at this kind of a thing all right. You'll let me have it for my gallery, won't you? Thanks.