Nearly Every One Present Had Protested At The Time, And The Hardest Things I Felt Like Saying Were Mild Compared With The Things Already Said By That Official's Own Colleagues.

But these things were forgotten in the hearty greetings of friends and bundles of letters from home.

It was eight o'clock, and of course black night when we landed; yet it was midnight when we thought of sleep.

Fort Resolution is always dog-town; and now it seemed at its worst. When the time came to roll up in our blankets, we were fully possessed of the camper's horror of sleeping indoors; but it was too dark to put up a tent and there was not a square foot of ground anywhere near that was not polluted and stinking of "dog-sign," so very unwillingly I broke my long spell of sleeping out, on this 131st day, and passed the night on the floor of the Hudson's Bay Company house. I had gone indoors to avoid the "dog-sign" and next morning found, alas, that I had been lying all night on "cat-sign."

I say lying; I did not sleep. The closeness of the room, in spite of an open window, the novelty, the smells, combined with the excitement of letters from home, banished sleep until morning came, and, of course, I got a bad cold, the first I had had all summer.

Here I said "good-bye" to old Weeso. He grinned affably, and when I asked what he would like for a present said, "Send me an axe like yours," There were three things in my outfit that aroused the cupidity of nearly every Indian, the Winchester rifle, the Peterboro canoe and the Marble axe, "the axe that swallows its face." Weeso had a rifle, we could not spare or send him a canoe, so I promised to send him the axe. Post is slow, but it reached him six months later and I doubt not is even now doing active service.

Having missed the last steamer, we must go on by canoe. Canoeing up the river meant "tracking" all the way; that is, the canoe must be hauled up with a line, by a man walking on the banks; hard work needing not only a strong, active man, but one who knows the river. Through the kindness of J. McLeneghan, of the Swiggert Trading Company, I was spared the horrors of my previous efforts to secure help at Fort Resolution, and George Sanderson, a strong young half-breed, agreed to take me to Fort Smith for $2.00 a day and means of returning. George was a famous hunter and fisher, and a "good man" to travel. I marked his broad shoulders and sinewy, active form with joy, especially in view of his reputation. In one respect he was different from all other half-breeds that I ever knew - he always gave a straight answer. Ask an ordinary half-breed, or western white man, indeed, how far it is to such a point, his reply commonly is, "Oh, not so awful far," or "It is quite a piece," or "It aint such a hell of a ways," conveying to the stranger no shadow of idea whether it is a hundred yards, a mile, or a week's travel.

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