Day after day, they trudged along the beach at high water mark, always wet and muddy. Innumerable creeks which drained the swamp crossed their path and interrupted their progress. Finally they came to the mighty Kissiskatchewan or Nelson river, on the north bank of which the Indians had laid up a canoe. Paddling across to the south shore, they crossed the tongue of low land that separates the mouth of the Nelson from that of the Hayes river; and were at last in York. The governor to whom Thompson reported was the notorious Humphrey Marten. This old tyrant was now in his twenty-fourth year of service with the Company. Surrounded by his numerous native wives and a horde of half-breed children, he ruled the fort with a rod of iron. The Indians who visited the factory he would beat most cruelly, sending them away with revenge burning in their hearts. In the fort, his subordinates felt the weight of his unbridled temper; and they bowed to his brutality only because they feared his vindictiveness. Amid such surroundings and under such a taskmaster, Thompson passed the following year. He kept the accounts of the factory in his neat handwriting, and joined with the rest of the staff in the hunting necessary to supply the fort with food during the winter. CHAPTER II HE FINDS HIS MÉTIER His first two years of service brought nothing but disappointment and disillusion to David Thompson. Vaguely sensible of his capacities, he was conscious of nothing except that as yet he had been given no scope to realize them. But in the summer of 1786 a new and important chapter opened in his life. Fitted out with a trunk, a handkerchief, shoes, shirts, a gun, powder, and a tin cup, he was included in a party of forty-six "Englishmen" who left for the interior under the leadership of Robert Longmore to establish trading posts on the Saskatchewan river to the west of those already occupied by the Company.