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Thompson stepped from the canoe to the sloping, sun-blistered beach before Fort Pachugan, and if he did not openly offer thanks to his Maker that he stood once more upon solid ground he at least experienced profound relief. For many days he had occupied that midship position with ill-concealed misgivings.
He could not hold converse with the Crees. The Lachlan family relapsed into painful stiffness when he entered their house. There was no common ground between him and them. He was really marking time until the next mail should arrive at Fort Pachugan. The days were growing shorter, the nights edged with sharp frosts.
His diffidence, verging upon forthright embarrassment, precipitated him into abruptness. He was addressing the older man, a spare-built man with a trim gray beard and a disconcerting direct gaze. "I am a newcomer to this place. The factor of Fort Pachugan spoke of a Mr. Carr here. Have I er the ah pleasure of addressing that gentleman?"
Then he had surmised that Lone Moose might be a replica of Fort Pachugan. MacLeod had partly disabused his mind of that. But he still could not keep out of his mind's eye a somewhat hazy picture of Lone Moose as a group of houses on the bank of a stream, with Indians and breeds no matter how dirty and unkempt going impassively about their business, an organized community, however rude.
But Fort Pachugan had become a mere collecting station for the lesser furs, a distributing center for trade goods to native trappers. There were no more hostile tribes. The Company no longer dealt out the high justice, the middle, and the low. The stockade and the brass cannon were traditions. Pachugan sprawled on the bank of the lake, open to all comers, a dimming landmark of the old days.
Except for that chill and a slight closeness, the cabin was as he had left it. Outside, his two dogs snarled and growled over their evening ration of dried fish, and when they had consumed the last scrap curled hardily in the snow bank near the cabin wall. Thompson had achieved a hair-cut at Pachugan. Now he got out his razor and painstakingly scraped away the accumulated beard.
But since that was out of the question, he took his seat in the canoe each morning and faced each stretch of troubled water with an inward prayer. The last stretch and this last day had tried his soul to its utmost. Pachugan lay near the end of the water route. What few miles he had to travel beyond the post would lie along the lake shore, and the lake reassured him with its smiling calm.
Having decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in the deep of winter across a primitive land. To be exact in dates it was February the first when they touched at Pachugan, where Tommy traded in his furs, and where they took on a capacity load of grub.
So, by degrees, the free-trader's stock approached depletion, until there remained no more than two good dog teams could haul. With that on sleds, and a few bundles of furs traded in by trappers whose lines radiated from the Porcupine, Thompson and Joe Lamont came back to Fort Pachugan. The factor seemed well pleased with the undertaking.
Even apart from that he was uncommonly glad to see Tommy Ashe. "It doesn't go much at all," he said. "As a matter of fact, I just got back to Lone Moose to-night after being away for weeks." "Same here," Tommy responded. "I've been trapping. Heard you'd gone to Pachugan, but thought it was only for supplies.
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