The merriment went from
it. He stared at Father Charles. The priest was rising, his face more
tense and whiter still, his hands reaching out to the stranger.
In another moment the stranger had leaped to him--not to shake his hands,
but to clasp the priest in his great arms, shaking him, and crying out a
strange joy, while for the first time that night the pale face of Father
Charles was lighted up with a red and joyous glow.
After several minutes the newcomer released Father Charles, and turned to
the others with a great hearty laugh.
"Gentlemen," he said, "you must pardon me for interrupting you like this.
You will understand when I tell you that Father Charles is an old friend
of mine, the dearest friend I have on earth, and that I haven't seen him
for years. I was his first penitent!"
PETER GOD
Peter God was a trapper. He set his deadfalls and fox-baits along the
edge of that long, slim finger of the Great Barren, which reaches out of
the East well into the country of the Great Bear, far to the West. The
door of his sapling-built cabin opened to the dark and chilling gray of
the Arctic Circle; through its one window he could watch the sputter and
play of the Northern Lights; and the curious hissing purr of the Aurora
had grown to be a monotone in his ears.
Whence Peter God had come, and how it was that he bore the strange name
by which he went, no man had asked, for curiosity belongs to the white
man, and the nearest white men were up at Fort MacPherson, a hundred or
so miles away.
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