Lords of the North | Page 5

expulsion of all rivals
to the Hudson's Bay Company from the northern territory.
"Where can Hamilton be?" said I, losing interest in the traders' quarrel
as soon as they went into details.
"Home with his wifie," half sneered the officer in a nagging way, that
irritated me, though the remark was, doubtless, true. "Home with his
wifie," he repeated in a sing-song, paying no attention to the
elucidation of a subject he had raised. "Good old man, Hamilton, but
since marriage, utterly gone to the bad!"
"To the what?" I queried, taking him up short. This officer, with the
pudding cheeks and patronizing insolence, had a provoking trick of
always keeping just inside the bounds of what one might resent. "To
the what, did you say Hamilton had gone?"
"To the domestics," says he laughing, then to the others, as if he had
listened to every word of the explanations, "and if His Little Excellency,
Governor MacDonell, by the grace of Lord Selkirk, ruler over
gentlemen adventurers in no-man's-land, expels the good Nor'-Westers
from nowhere to somewhere else, what do the good Nor'-Westers

intend doing to the Little Tyrant?"
"Charles the First him," responds a wag of the club.
"Where's your Cromwell?" laughs the colonel.
"Our Cromwell's a Cameron, temper of a Lucifer, oaths before action,"
answers the wag.
"Tuts!" exclaims Uncle Jack testily. "We'll settle His Lordship's little
martinet of the plains. Warrant for his arrest! Fetch him out!"
"Warrant 43rd King George III. will do it," added one of the partners
who had looked the matter up.
"43rd King George III. doesn't give jurisdiction for trial in Lower
Canada, if offense be committed elsewhere," interjects a lawyer with
show of importance.
"A Daniel come to judgment," laughs the colonel, winking as my
uncle's wrath rose.
"Pah!" says Mr. Jack MacKenzie in disgust, stamping on the floor with
both feet. "You lawyers needn't think you'll have your pickings when
fur companies quarrel. We'll ship him out, that's all. Neither of the
companies wants to advertise its profits--"
"Or its methods--ahem!" interjects the colonel.
"And its private business," adds my uncle, looking daggers at Adderly,
"by going to court."
Then they all rose to go to the dining-room; and as I stepped out to
have a look down the street for Hamilton, I heard Colonel Adderly's
last fling--"Pretty rascals, you gentlemen adventurers are, so shy and
coy about law courts."
It was a dark night, with a few lonely stars in mid-heaven, a sickle
moon cutting the horizon cloud-rim and a noisy March wind that boded

snow from The Labrador, or sleet from the Gulf.
When Eric Hamilton left the Hudson's Bay Company's service at York
Factory on Hudson Bay and came to live in Quebec, I was but a student
at Laval. It was at my Uncle MacKenzie's that I met the tall, dark,
sinewy, taciturn man, whose influence was to play such a strange part
in my life; and when these two talked of their adventures in the far,
lone land of the north, I could no more conceal my awe-struck
admiration than a girl could on first discovering her own charms in a
looking-glass. I think he must have noticed my boyish reverence, for
once he condescended to ask about the velvet cap and green sash and
long blue coat which made up the Laval costume, and in a moment I
was talking to him as volubly as if he were the boy and I, the great
Hudson's Bay trader.
"It makes me feel quite like a boy again," he had said on resuming
conversation with Mr. MacKenzie. "By Jove! Sir, I can hardly realize I
went into that country a lad of fifteen, like your nephew, and here I am,
out of it, an old man."
"Pah, Eric man," says my uncle, "you'll be finding a wife one of these
days and renewing your youth."
"Uncle," I broke out when the Hudson's Bay man had gone home, "how
old is Mr. Hamilton?"
"Fifteen years older than you are, boy, and I pray Heaven you may
have half as much of the man in you at thirty as he has," returns my
uncle mentally measuring me with that stern eye of his. At that
information, my heart gave a curious, jubilant thud. Henceforth, I no
longer looked upon Mr. Hamilton with the same awe that a choir boy
entertains for a bishop. Something of comradeship sprang up between
us, and before that year had passed we were as boon companions as
man and boy could be. But Hamilton presently spoiled it all by
fulfilling my uncle's prediction and finding a wife, a beautiful,
fair-haired, frail slip of a girl, near enough the twenties to patronize me
and too much of the young lady to find pleasure in an awkward