“Sleeman? He at ranch. Ole woman she go dead. Girl she at home—good clothes—oh!” Here, English failing him, Tom launched forth in his native tongue into a highly coloured description of the magnificence of the Sleeman girl. Asa, too, according to Tom, had developed into a “beeg man,” “fat,” with plenty of money and gorgeously apparelled. Sleeman, as far as Paul could gather, had made “much big money” through his contracts in supplies with the railway construction gangs. He listened with growing bitterness of spirit to Tom’s glowing accounts of the good fortune that had come to the Sleemans, with which he contrasted the unhappy fate that had befallen his father and his family, due to Sleeman’s crimes. The age-long problem of the prosperity of the wicked in a world ruled by a righteous God pressed hard upon his soul. During those six lonely years with the Chippewayans in the North land, while he was passing from boyhood to manhood, he had pondered long and deeply upon that problem. True, his father had committed his sin. But he had repented of his sin, bitterly repented, and to the utmost of his power had made atonement. His sin had been forgiven and he himself reinstated in the Divine favour. That was simple and right. Paul had come to estimate at its full ethical value that sin and not according to the standard of the savage or of the frontier people with whom he had met. In her hasty flight from the consequences of her crime his Indian stepmother had taken care to pack with her necessities a few books, snatched up almost at random, among them two engineering books of his father’s, a volume of Shakespeare and his Bible, his mother’s gift to him. The engineering books and the Shakespeare he had practically mastered, as far at least as the text was concerned. As for the Bible, during those years of isolation from civilisation no day passed without his giving an hour or more to its study. More than that, at the request of his stepmother it became his daily practice to make the Bible a text book for her children. For Tanna this was an hour of unmixed delight, but for Peter the trail was heavy and progress was at the cost of much toil and suffering. In regard to his problem of evil and its punishment Paul had founded his system of ethics upon the doctrine set forth in the Old Testament and in the tragedies of the great master of the drama in the English or indeed in any other tongue. That doctrine was simple and straightforward. The criminal in due course received the just reward of his crime, both here and hereafter. That was entirely as it should be.