Jan understood
the silence, and took it for what it meant.
But it was the audience in the little cabin that Jan liked best, and,
most of all, he loved to have the little Melisse alone. As the days of
early spring trapping approached, and the wilderness for a hundred
miles around the post was crisscrossed with the trails of the Cree and
Chippewayan fur-seekers, Cummins was absent for days at a time,
strengthening the company's friendships, and bargaining for the catch
that would be coming to market about eight weeks later.
This was a year of intense rivalry, for the Revillons, French
competitors of the company, had established a post two hundred miles
to the west, and rumor spread that they were to give sixty pounds of
flour to the company's forty, and four feet of cloth to the yard. This
meant action among Williams and his people, and the factor himself
plunged into the wilderness. Mukee, the half-Cree, went among his
scattered tribesmen along the edge of the barrens, stirring them by
the eloquence of new promises and by fierce condemnation of the
interlopers to the west. Old Per-ee, with a strain of Eskimo in him,
went boldly behind his dogs to meet the little black people from
farther north, who came down after foxes and half-starved polar bears
that had been carried beyond their own world on the ice-floes of the
preceding spring.
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