It was past nine o’clock when Howland entered the little old Windsor Hotel.  The big room, through the windows of which he could look out on the street and across the frozen Saskatchewan, was almost empty.  The clerk had locked his cigar-case and had gone to bed.  In one corner, partly shrouded in gloom, sat a half-breed trapper who had come in that day from the Lac la Ronge country, and at his feet crouched one of his wolfish sledge-dogs.  Both were wide-awake and stared curiously at Howland as he came in.  In front of the two large windows sat half a dozen men, as silent as the half-breed, clad in moccasins and thick caribou skin coats.  One of them was the factor from a Hudson Bay post at Lac Bain who had not been down to the edge of civilization for three years; the others, including two Crees and a Chippewayan, were hunters and Post men who had driven in their furs from a hundred miles to the north.

For a moment Howland paused in the middle of the room and looked about him.  Ordinarily he would have liked this quiet, and would have gone to one of the two rude tables to write a letter or work out a problem of some sort, for he always carried a pocketful of problems about with him.  His fifteen years of study and unceasing slavery to his ambition had made him naturally as taciturn as these grim men of the North, who were born to silence.  But to-night there had come a change over him.  He wanted to talk.  He wanted to ask questions.  He longed for human companionship, for some kind of mental exhilaration beyond that furnished by his own thoughts.  Feeling in his pocket for a cigar he seated himself before one of the windows and proffered it to the factor from Lac Bain.

“You smoke?” he asked companionably.

“I was born in a wigwam,” said the factor slowly, taking the cigar.  “Thank you.”

“Deuced polite for a man who hasn’t seen civilization for three years,” thought Howland, seating himself comfortably, with his feet on the window-sill.  Aloud he said, “The clerk tells me you are from Lac Bain.  That’s a good distance north, isn’t it?”

“Four hundred miles,” replied the factor with quiet terseness.  “We’re on the edge of the Barren Lands.”

“Whew!” Howland shrugged his shoulders.  Then he volunteered, “I’m going north myself to-morrow.”

“Post man?”

“No; engineer.  I’m putting through the Hudson Bay Railroad.”

He spoke the words quite clearly and as they fell from his lips the half-breed, partly concealed in the gloom behind him, straightened with the alert quickness of a cat.  He leaned forward eagerly, his black eyes gleaming, and then rose softly from his seat.  His moccasined feet made no sound as he came up behind Howland.  It was the big huskie who first gave a sign of his presence.  For a moment the upturned eyes of the young engineer met those of the half-breed.  That look gave Howland a glimpse of a face which he could never forget—­a