This was a new kind of challenge to feudalism. Sooner or later it was bound to come. The ultimate umpire of all things in life is—Fact. Was the charter valid that gave this empire of trade to a few Englishmen, or was it buncombe? “The Pedlars” didn’t talk about their rights. _They took them._ That was to be supreme test of the English Company’s rights. Somebody else took the rights, and there were good reasons why the Hudson’s Bay Company did not care to bring a question of its rights before the courts. When the charter was confirmed by act of Parliament in 1697, it was specified for only seven years. At the end of that period the Company did not seek a renewal. Request for renewal would of itself be acknowledgment of doubt as to the charter. The Company preferred “to have and to hold,” rather than risk adverse decision. They contented themselves with blocking the petitions of rivals for trade privileges on the bay, but the eruption of these wildwood rovers—“The French Canadian Pedlars”—was a contingency against which there seemed to be no official redress. It remained only for the old Company to gird itself to the fray—a fight with bandits and free-booters and raiders in a region where was law of neither God nor man. Sales had fallen to a paltry £2,000 a year. Dividends stopped altogether. Value of stock fell from £250 to £50. The Company advertised for men—more men. Agents scoured the Orkneys and the Highlands of Scotland for recruits, each to sign for five years, a bounty of £8 to be paid each man. Five ships a year sailed to the bay. Three hundred “patroons” were yearly sent into the woods, and when their time expired—strange to relate—they did not return to Scotland. What became of them? Letters ceased to come home. Inquiries remained unanswered. The wilderness had absorbed them and their bones lay bleaching on the unsheltered prairie where the arrow of Indian raider inspired by “the Pedlars” had shot them as they traversed the plains. No wonder service with the Hudson’s Bay Company became ill-omened in the Orkneys and the Highlands! In spite of the bounty of £8 a man, their agents were at their wits’ ends for recruits. When Hendry had gone up the Saskatchewan in 1754, he had seen the houses of French traders. French power fell at Quebec in 1759, and the French wood-rovers scattered to the wilds; but when Cocking went up the Saskatchewan in 1772, what was his amazement to find these French rovers organized under leadership of Scotch merchants from Montreal—Curry, and Frobisher, and McTavish, and Todd, and McGill, and McGillivrays.