And now, in this year before rail and steamboat, the glory of early summer was at hand, and the wilderness people were coming up to meet the freight.  The Three Rivers—­the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie, all joining in one great two-thousand-mile waterway to the northern sea—­were athrill with the wild impulse and beat of life as the forest people lived it.  The Great Father had sent in his treaty money, and Cree song and Chipewyan chant joined the age-old melodies of French and half-breed.  Countless canoes drove past the slower and mightier scow brigades; huge York boats with two rows of oars heaved up and down like the ancient galleys of Rome; tightly woven cribs of timber, and giant rafts made tip of many cribs were ready for their long drift into a timberless country.  On this two-thousand-mile waterway a world had gathered.  It was the Nile of the northland, and each post and gathering place along its length was turned into a metropolis, half savage, archaic, splendid with the strength of red blood, clear eyes, and souls that read the word of God in wind and tree.

And up and down this mighty waterway of wilderness trade ran the whispering spirit of song, like the voice of a mighty god heard under the stars and in the winds.

But it was an hour ago that David Carrigan had vividly pictured these things to himself close to the big river, and many things may happen in the sixty minutes that follow any given minute in a man’s life.  That hour ago his one great purpose had been to bring in Black Roger Audemard, alive or dead—­Black Roger, the forest fiend who had destroyed half a dozen lives in a blind passion of vengeance nearly fifteen years ago.  For ten of those fifteen years it had been thought that Black Roger was dead.  But mysterious rumors had lately come out of the North.  He was alive.  People had seen him.  Fact followed rumor.  His existence became certainty.  The Law took up once more his hazardous trail, and David Carrigan was the messenger it sent.

“Bring him back, alive or dead,” were Superintendent McVane’s last words.

And now, thinking of that parting injunction, Carrigan grinned, even as the sweat of death dampened his face in the heat of the afternoon sun.  For at the end of those sixty minutes that had passed since his midday pot of tea, the grimly, atrociously unexpected had happened, like a thunderbolt out of the azure of the sky.

II

Huddled behind a rock which was scarcely larger than his body, groveling in the white, soft sand like a turtle making a nest for its eggs, Carrigan told himself this without any reservation.  He was, as he kept repeating to himself for the comfort of his soul, in a deuce of a fix.  His head was bare—­simply because a bullet had taken his hat away.  His blond hair was filled with sand.  His face was sweating.  But his blue eyes were alight with a grim sort of humor, though he knew that unless the other fellow’s ammunition ran out he was going to die.