and Dick went on his knee as his eyesight cleared and looked into the sunny eyes of a white baby rolling on the musk-ox robes. She was two years old, perhaps, and she snatched at his face with round dimpled hands, cooing and kicking her feet in delight. Indian rags were wrapped round her, and her yellow hair was cut across the forehead, Indian-fashion. Then the tepee-entrance was darkened by the broad bulk of an old breed woman, and Dick sat back on his heels and asked questions.
"Aha!" said the old breed. "She belong to Alphonse Michu. Him wife die and him go to the trapping and take the baby. I have her sometimes. And the other women they do have her sometimes. She quite pretty baby."
"Is Alphonse Michu here?"
The old breed nodded, and Dick went out, strangely moved. From something such as this had Grange's Andree come, and well enough he knew what it had made of her. He remembered Tempest's talk at Churchill about the responsibilities of the white man; but it was not that alone which sent him in search of Alphonse Michu. A great and overwhelming pity for helpless childhood and girlhood possessed him for the first time in his life, and he acted in obedience to it.
But he could do not anything at all with Alphonse Michu. The French Canadian loved his baby passionately, and perhaps, in his superstitious heart, he regarded her as a fetish. Dick's determined efforts brought the anger into his voice and his long pale face. But they could do no more, and he left the man with a prayer in his heart.
"The Lord send she doesn't turn out as pretty as Grange's Andree," he said.
On the slope to the barracks he overtook a breed with a husky team which hauled a heavily-laden sled. He stopped with that intuition which never failed him where faces and names were concerned.
"Why, Tommy Joseph," he said. "What are you taking your catch to the barracks for?"
"Wolves," said Tommy Joseph, raising his gaunt face for a moment. Dick glanced from the lean, dark man to the huskies where the blood of their wolf-progenitors
