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At the back of the big room was the small one where McElroy and Ridgar had their living, furnished scantily with a bed and table, an open fireplace and crane, some rude, hand-made chairs, and a shelf of books. And to this post of De Seviere had come in the dusk of the previous night a little company of people.

Towering mightily in the prow of his canoe, the sweeping head-dress of feathers crowning him with a certain majesty, he fixed his keen glance on Ridgar and came gliding toward him across the rippled water.

There was only the roar of the wind without, the whistle of the fire, and the two men alone in the room as they had been many a winter's night. "Now, where shall I begin?" said the chief trader, gazing into the fire. "At what point?" "Maren," said McElroy eagerly, from the bed; "begin with her." Ridgar shook his head. "Nay, it goes farther back.

In the eyes of both, as they regarded each other, were memories known to no one else. McElroy wondered what they were and what that year, of which Ridgar had spoken only once, had held. The trader spoke their tongue as easily as he spoke any other that came to the post, naturally and with quiet fluency.

Ridgar's eyes, as he had seen them in the dimness of the outskirts of that massed circle, brought back the lost period of time and all that had passed therein. He stared wildly at him, and then around the firelit room. "Ah!" said Ridgar softly, getting slowly to his feet with a smile at once tender and exaggeratedly calm. "You have awakened, have you; eh, lad?

And while the sachems and the headmen, the beaters of the tom-toms, and those who tended the Sacred fires of the Dreamers formed into procession and slowly filed out into the forest, Edmonton Ridgar drew a long breath of relief. Maren had postponed the sure culmination of the tests by her clever feat, he had postponed it a little longer by his own.

In the midst of it the flaps of the big lodge were opened and, amid redoubled wailing, a stark wedge of the length of a tall man came headforemost out, carried on the shoulders of six gigantic warriors; and walking beside it, bareheaded in the new day, was Edmonton Ridgar, his face pale and downcast. He paid no heed to the two men on the ground, though one was his factor and his friend.

One by one, in utter silence, their faces changed in a moment into masks of uneasiness, the sachems and medicine men rose and followed. In the wavering shadows thrown by the central fire the big tepee stood in awesome majesty. Ridgar raised the flap and entered, dropping it as the savages filed in to the number of all it would hold. "See!" he said dramatically.

It was Edmonton Ridgar. Reluctantly they obeyed, sullenly, as if bound by a bond against their will. In the sudden hush he spoke. "What do ye here, my brothers?" he asked, and waited. There was no reply from the mass before him. "Wherefore is the spirit of my Father vexed that it disturbs my watch inside the death-lodge?" The small rustling of the excited crowd ceased in every quarter.

"Lad," said Edmonton Ridgar with that easy probing of the well-known friend, "there is something eating at your mind these days. The trade goes differently from that of last year. It is not so all-absorbing. I fear me that the Nor'westers, with their plundering and their tales of deportation, have entered a wedge of worry."