It was Father Roland’s voice that made him wrap up the picture again, this time not in its old covering, but in a silk handkerchief which he had pawed out of his bag, and which he dropped back again, and locked in.  Thoreau was telling the Missioner about David’s early rising when the latter reappeared.  They shook hands, and the Missioner, looking David keenly in the eyes, saw the change in him.

“No need to tell me you had a good night!” he exclaimed.

“Splendid,” affirmed David.

The window was blazing with the golden sun now; it shot through where the frost was giving way, and a ray of it fell like a fiery shaft on Marie’s glossy head as she bent over the table.  Father Roland pointed to the window with one hand on David’s arm.

“Wait until you get out into that,” he said.  “This is just a beginning, David—­just a beginning!”

They sat down to breakfast, fish and coffee, bread and potatoes—­and beans.  It was almost finished when David split open his third piece of fish, white as snow under its crisp brown, and asked quite casually: 

“Did you ever hear of the Stikine River, Father?”

Father Roland sat up, stopped his eating, and looked at David for a moment as though the question struck an unusual personal interest in him.

“I know a man who lived for a great many years along the Stikine,” he replied then.  “He knows every mile of it from where it empties into the sea at Point Rothshay to the Lost Country between Mount Finlay and the Sheep Mountains.  It’s in the northern part of British Columbia, with its upper waters reaching into the Yukon.  A wild country.  A country less known than it was sixty years ago, when there was a gold rush up over the old telegraph trail.  Tavish has told me a lot about it.  A queer man—­this Tavish.  We hit his cabin on our way to God’s Lake.”

“Did he ever tell you,” said David, with an odd quiver in his throat—­“Did he ever tell you of a stream, a tributary stream, called Firepan Creek?”

“Firepan Creek—­Firepan Creek,” mumbled the Little Missioner.  “He has told me a great many things, this Tavish, but I can’t remember that. Firepan Creek!  Yes, he did!  I remember, now.  He had a cabin on it one year, the year he had small-pox.  He almost died there.  I want you to meet Tavish, David.  We will stay overnight at his cabin.  He is a strange character—­a great object lesson.”  Suddenly he came back to David’s question.  “What do you want to know about Stikine River and Firepan Creek?” he asked.

“I was reading something about them that interested me,” replied David.  “A very wild country, I take it, from what Tavish has told you.  Probably no white people.”

“Always, everywhere, there are a few white people,” said Father Roland.  “Tavish is white, and he was there.  Sixty years ago, in the gold rush, there must have been many.  But I fancy there are very few now.  Tavish can tell us.  He came from there only a year ago this last September.”