hour later the three gold seekers returned to their canoe laden with the choicest of the bear meat, and the animal's skin, which was immediately stretched between two trees, high up out of the reach of depredating animals. Rod gazed at it proudly.
"We'll be sure and get it when we come back, won't we?"
"Sure," replied Wabi.
"It will be safe?"
"As safe as though it were at home."
"Unless somebody comes along and steals it," added Rod.
Wabi was busy unloading certain necessary articles from the canoe, but he ceased his work to look at Rod.
"Steal!" he cried in astonishment.
Mukoki, too, had heard Rod's remark and was listening.
"Rod," continued Wabigoon quietly, "that is one thing we don't have up here. Our great big glorious North doesn't know the word thief, except when it is applied to a Woonga. If a white hunter came along here to-morrow, and found that hide stretched so low that the animals were getting at it, he would nail it higher for us. An Indian, if he camped here, would build his fire so that the sparks wouldn't strike it. Rod, up here, where we don't know civilization, we're honest!"
"But down in the States," said Rod, "the Indians steal."
The words slipped from him. The next instant he would have given anything to have been able to recall them. Mukoki had grown a little more tense in his attitude.
"That's because white men have lived so much among them, white men who are called civilized," answered the young scion of Wabinosh House, his eyes growing bright. "White blood makes thieves. Pardon me for saying it, Rod, but it does, at least among Indians. But our white blood up here is different from yours. It's the same blood that's in our Indians, every drop of it honest, loyal to its friends, and it runs red and strong with the love of this great wilderness. There are exceptions, of course, as you have seen in the Woongas, who are an outlaw race. But we are honest, and Mukoki there, if he were dying of cold, wouldn't steal a skin to save himself. An ordinary Indian might take it, if he were dying for want of it, but not unless he had a gun to leave in its place!"
"I didn't mean to say what I did," said Rod. "Oh, I wish I were one of you! I love this big wilderness, and everything in it, and it's glorious to hear you say what you do!"
"You are one of us," cried Wabi, gripping his hand.
That evening, after they had finished their supper and the three were gathered about the fire, Wabigoon said:
"Muky could tell you one reason why the Indians of the North are honest if he wanted to, Rod. But he won't, so I will. There was once a tribe in the country of Mukoki's fore-fathers, along the Makoki River, which empties into the Albany, whose men were great thieves, and who stole from one another. No man's snare was safe from his neighbor, fights and killings were of almost daily occurrence, and the chief of the tribe was the greatest thief of all, and of course escaped punishment. This chief loved to set his own snares, and one day he was enraged to find that one of his tribe had been so bold as to set a snare within a few inches of his own, and in the trail of the same animal. He determined on meting out a terrible punishment, and waited.
"While he was waiting a rabbit ran into the snare of his rival. Picking up a stick he approached to kill the game, when suddenly there seemed to pass a white mist before his eyes, and when he looked again there was no rabbit, but the most wonderful creature he had ever beheld in the form of man, and he knew that it was the Great Spirit, and fell upon his face. And a great voice came to him, as if rolling from far beyond the most distant mountains, and it told him that the forests and streams of the red man's heaven were closed to him and his people, that in the hunting-grounds that came after death there was no place for thieves.
"'Go to your people,' he said, 'and tell them this. Tell them that from this day on, moon upon moon, until the end of time, must they live like brothers, setting their snares side by side without war, to escape the punishment that hovers over them.'
"And the chief told his people this," finished Wabi, "and from that hour there was no more thievery in the land. And because the Great Spirit came in the form he did the rabbit is the good luck animal of the Crees and Chippewayans of the far North, and wherever the snows fall deep, men set their traps side by side to this day, and do not rob."
Rod had listened with glowing eyes.
"It's glorious!" he repeated. "It's glorious, if it's true!"
"It is true," said Wabi. "In all this great country between here and the Barren Lands, where the musk-ox lives, there is not one Indian in a hundred who would steal another Indian's trap, or the game in it. It is one of the understood laws of the North that every hunter shall have his 'trap line,' or 'run,' and it is not courtesy for another trapper to encroach upon it; but if he should, and he should lay a trap close beside another's, it would not be wrong, for the law of the Great Spirit is greater than the law of man. Why, last winter even the outlaw Woongas made no effort to steal our traps, though they thirsted for our lives!"
"Mukoki," said Rod, rising, "I want to shake hands with you before I go to bed. I'm learning—fast. I wish I were half Indian!"
The next morning the journey up the Ombabika was resumed, and a little more of anxiety was now mingled with the enthusiasm of the adventurers. For no one of them could relieve himself of the possible significance of the gold bullet, the fear that their treasure had been discovered by another. Wabi regained his confidence first.
"I don't believe it!" he exclaimed at last. Without questioning, the others knew to what he referred. "I don't believe that our gold has been found. It is in the heart of the wildest country on the continent, and surely if such a rich find had been made we would have heard something about it at Wabinosh House or Kenegami, which are the nearest points of supply."
"Or, if it was found, the discoverer is dead," added Rod.
"Yes."
In the stern, Mukoki nodded and grunted his conviction.
"Dead," he repeated.
The Ombabika had now become narrow and violent. Against its swift current the canoe made but little headway, and at noon Mukoki announced that the river journey was at an end. For a few moments Rod did not recognize where they had landed. Then he gave a sudden cry of glad surprise.
"Why, this is where we had supper that night after our terrible adventure on the river last winter," he exclaimed.
From far off there came faintly to his ears a low, rumbling thunder.
"Listen! That's the river rushing through the break in the mountain where we walked the edge of the precipice!"
Wabi shrugged his shoulders at the memory of that fearful night and its desperate race to escape from the Woonga country.
"We've got to do the same thing again, only this time it will be in daylight."
"Long portage," said Mukoki. "Six mile. Carry everything."
"Until we reach the little creek in the plains beyond the mountain, where you shot the caribou?" asked Rod.
"Yes," replied Wabigoon. "That little creek will now be a pretty husky stream, and by hard work we can paddle up it until we come within about eight miles of our old camp at
