“These Eskimos are careless scallawags with letters and they lose them sometimes.  The letters I am sending are very important ones or I wouldn’t be sending them.  I think you would take better care of them than they.  Will you keep them safe if I let you go with the Eskimos?”

“Yes, sir, I’d be rare careful.”

“Well, we’ll see.  I think I’ll let you take the letters.  I can’t say yet just when I’ll have you start but within the month.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“In the meantime make yourself useful about the place here.  There’ll be nothing for you to do to-day.  Look around and get acquainted.  You may go now.  Come to the office in the morning and one of the clerks will tell you what to do.”

“All right, sir.”

When Bob passed out of doors he was fairly treading upon air.  A way was opening up for him to return home and in all probability he should reach there by the time Dick and Ed and Bill came out from the trails in the spring and if they had not, in the meantime, taken the news of his disappearance to Wolf Bight, the folks at home would know nothing of it until he told them himself and would have no unusual cause for worry in the meantime.  He felt a considerable sense of importance, too, at the confidence Mr. MacPherson reposed in him in suggesting that he might place him in charge of an important mail.  And what a tale he would have to tell!  Bessie would think him quite a hero.  After all it had turned out well.  He had caught a silver fox and all the other fur—­quite enough, he was sure, to send Emily to the hospital.  God had been very good to him and he cast his eyes to heaven and breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving.

Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn had been quite forgotten by Bob in the excitement of the arrival at the Fort.  Now he saw them and the two other Indians coming over from the cabin to which they had gone when he left them to meet Mr. MacPherson, and he hurried down to meet them and tell them that he had found a way to reach home.  It was plain that they did not approve of the turn matters had taken, for they only grunted and said nothing.

They turned to a building where the door stood open and Bob accompanied them and entered with them.  This was the Post shop, and a young man, whom Bob had not seen before, presumably “Lord Salisbury,” the chief clerk of whom the talkative “Secretary Bayard” had spoken, was behind the counter attending to the wants of an Eskimo and his wife, the latter with a black-eyed, round-faced baby which sat contentedly in her hood sucking a stick of black tobacco.  The clerk spoke to the Indians in their language, said “good day” to Bob in English, and then continued his dickering in the Eskimo language with his customers, who had deposited before them on the counter a number of arctic fox pelts.

When the clerk had finished with the Eskimos he turned to the Indians in a very businesslike way and asked to see the furs they had brought.  They produced some marten skins which, after a great deal of wrangling, were bartered for tobacco, tea, powder, shot, bullets, gun caps, beads, three-cornered needles and a few trinkets.  Much time was consumed in this, for the Indians insisted upon handling and discussing at length each individual article purchased.