Side by side, conversing in a few sentences, the trader and the chief entered the post, followed by the headmen and proceeded to the factory, where McElroy stood to welcome them in the open door.

They entered, to the ceremony of the pipe, the speech, and the bargain, while those without made a great camp two hundred strong all along the bank of the stream, beached the canoes, stacked the beaver packs, set up the tepees of the seventeen sticks, and built the little fires without which no camp is a camp.

In a little space the quiet shore was all a-bustle and activity reigned where the silence of the spring morning had lain, dew-heavy.

Among those most eager who peered at the gate, and who presently ventured forth to the better view the bustling concourse of braves and squaws, was Maren Le Moyne, her dark eyes wide, soft lips apart, and face all a-quiver with keen enjoyment of the scene.

These were the first she had ever seen of those Indians who came from the west.  Who knew?  Perhaps those moccasined feet had trod the virgin forest of her dreams, those sombre eyes looked upon the Whispering Hills, those grave faces been lifted to the sweet wind that sang from the west and whose caress she felt even now upon her cheeks.

Perhaps,—­perhaps, even, some swift forest-runner among them, far on his quest of the home of the caribou or with news of some friendly tribe, had come upon a man, an old man rugged of frame and face, with blue eyes like lakes in his swarthy darkness, and muscles that bespoke the forge and hammer.

Who knew?

Maren’s strongly modelled chin twitched a bit while the little flame of tenderness that flickered ever behind the graveness of her eyes leaped up.  She longed for their speech that she might go among them and ask.

A little way along the stockade wall to the north there lay a great rock, flat and smooth of surface, and here the girl drew apart from the women and sat herself down thereon, hands clasping her knees and the level sun in her eyes.  Her thoughts were soon faraway on the misty trail they had worn for themselves in the many years they had traversed the wilderness in search of what it held, and the eyes between the narrowed lids became blank with introspection.  And as she sat thus, a little way withdrawn from the scurrying activity of the scene, there came a, step on the soft green sod and a slim form in buckskins halted beside her.

It was young Marc Dupre, and his devil-may-care face was alert and smiling.

“Is that seat big enough for two, Ma’amselle?” he asked impertinently, though the heart in him was thumping a bit.  This was a woman, he recalled having thought, for whom one would fillip the face of Satan, and he was uncertain whether or no he had made a right beginning.

Maren started and looked swiftly up at him.

“It is, M’sieu,” she said quietly, “if those two are in simple, sensible accord.  Not if one of the two coquettes.”