Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 126: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

OR the North West Fur Com- pany’s manager, Arthur Clen-. denning, it had been a typical day at the Athabasca fur post. He had arisen at daylight, gone forth to at- tend to his traps on the sunken Winter trapping-grounds and returned to barter for the furs of the Chippewa Indians who, on the verge of the Spring, had wisely sledged in from their far-flung trap-lines. He had eaten tollibee, or whitefish, for breakfast, dinner and sup- per, mended leaks in canoes and worked with his crooked knife on the blades of the spare paddles he was making for the annual descent of the fur brigades into the South. He had done all these things asa mat- ter of daily routine and now, suspending that routine till another dawn, he re- corded his bartering of the day. On the thumbed pages of his day-book, shining yellow under the candle-light where it lay open on the trading-room counter, he proceeded to write the sum-total of his dealings in the terms of so many bales received for so many beaver—half-dol- lars—paid out. While he wrote, the snarl of quarrel- some voices annoyed him and he glanced up over the day-book’s pages to glimpse Perry and Weston, joint partners in the independent Athabasca post, bickering before his cavernous boulder-stone fire- place where, on the completion of some Author of “‘ Seignoirity of the Sea,” “Sunless Seas,’ etc. trafficking in supplies with him, they had seated themselves. . Temporarily Clen- denning had forgotten his rivals and guests, but now their language and their manner intruded on him. He could see their familiar forms in the shadow at the farther end. of the trading-room—Perry in fringed buck- skin, his swarthy eagle face, framed by long, straight hair, glowing coppery as an Indian’s in the firelight, and Weston in mottled woolens, flaming-bearded, sunny-haired, his skin as fair and his eyes as blue as any Dane’s. Men of startling contrast they were, and Clendenning marveled at the whim of circumstance which had mated them in trade in the far Athabasca. 112 Grande Portage traders both, like him- self and David Garland, whose near-by post added a third element of competition in the Athabasca, they had built up the lone Lake Superior depot of the early coureur de bois until it assumed the pro- portions of a half-way station for all the traders who trafficked in the West. They had erected buildings there along with the great Montreal firm of McTavish, Frobisher, Todd, McGill and MacGilli- vray ; the house of Gregory and McLeod; the private firm of Garland and that of Clendenning himself. As a consequence, a vast volume of business was handled at the half-way house. Rivalry was rife, each trader striv- ° 300 (E(0) CS €o