Metoosin, with that little treasure of food from the Post, did not know that he was poor, or that through many long years he had been slowly starving.  He was rich!  He was a great trapper!  And his Cree wife I-owa, with her long, sleek braid and her great, dark eyes, was tremendously proud of her lord, that he should bring home for her and the children such a wealth of things—­a little flour, a few cans of things, a few yards of cloth, and a little bright ribbon.  David choked when he ate with them that night.  But they were happy!  That, after all, was the reward of things, even though people died slowly of something which they could not understand.  And there were, in the domain of Father Roland, many Metoosins, and many I-owas, who prayed for nothing more than enough to eat, clothes to cover them, and the unbroken love of their firesides.  And David thought of them, as the weeks passed, as the most terribly enslaved of all the slaves of Civilization—­slaves of vain civilized women; for they had gone on like this for centuries, and would go on for other generations, giving into the hands of the great Company their life’s blood which, in the end, could be accounted for by a yearly dole of food which, under stress, did not quite serve to keep body and soul together.

It was after a comprehension of these things that David understood Father Roland’s great work.  In this kingdom of his, running approximately fifty miles in each direction from the Chateau—­except to the northward, where the Post lay—­there were two hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children.  In a great book the Little Missioner had their names, their ages, the blood that was in them, and where they lived; and by them he was worshipped as no man that ever lived in that vast country of cities and towns below the Height of Land.  At every tepee and shack they visited there was some token of love awaiting Father Roland; a rare skin here, a pair of moccasins there, a pair of snow shoes that it had taken an Indian woman’s hands weeks to make, choice cuts of meat, but mostly—­as they travelled along—­the thickly furred skins of animals; and never did they go to a place at which the Missioner did not leave something in return, usually some article of clothing so thick and warm that no Indian was rich enough to buy it for himself at the Post.  Twice each winter Father Roland sent down to Thoreau a great sledge load of these contributions of his people, and Thoreau, selling them, sent back a still greater sledge load of supplies that found their way in this manner of exchange into the shacks and tepees of the forest people.

“If I were only rich!” said Father Roland one night at the Chateau, when it was storming dismally outside.  “But I have nothing, David.  I can do only a tenth of what I would like to do.  There are only eighty families in this country of mine, and I have figured that a hundred dollars a family, spent down there and not at the Post, would keep them all in comfort through the longest and hardest