Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/79



of the steps. Facing the main entrance of the stockade stood two eighteen-pounders and two swivels, belligerent but rusty, and piled in orderly heaps were pyramids of black cannon-balls that were never disturbed, partly because there was no fighting; more because Robert Bruce, the old Scotch gardener, had piled them there, and woe betide the chick or child that presumed to interfere with anything that Bruce had done. Bruce was far away, now in England with the governor; but habit had become fixed. In all Bruce's eighteen months of absence not even a dog had ventured to nose the forbidden balls. Neither was the grass trodden. They seemed still to hear the gardener's call, "Meestress Dooglas! Meestress Dooglas! Kap the bairnies aflf the grass."

But to continue the dinner company at the fort. Daily, besides Douglas, there was the fort physician, Dr. Barclay; and the clerks, gay young fellows, English and Scotch, whose friends across the sea had sufficient influence to secure them a berth in the opulent fur company. Not that their present salary was at all princely, twenty to one hundred pounds sterling a year was the most that any received, but clerks by promotion became traders, chief-traders, factors, and partners. There was not one of them that did not expect to become a chief factor or to retire at middle life to an old-world manor on the Thames or the Dee. Some waited years, some a lifetime, for promotions that never came.

Rae would greet them each as they passed, Dunn, who wrote letters to the "London Times;" Allen, brother to the physician of the Earl of Selkirk; Roberts, factotum; and all the ever-changing train of voyageurs and traders.