But most of all she loved the long walks in the forest, in the deep gloom of moonlit nights with the weird, mysterious shadows all about them as the big man at her side told her of his great love while they planned and dreamed of the future; and then returned to the little office where she listened while he read aloud, pausing now and then to light his black pipe and blow clouds of blue smoke toward the low ceiling. He had grown very close to her, and very dear, this big, impetuous boy, who had suddenly become a masterful man, and in whom she found each day some new depth of feeling--some entirely unsuspected and unexplored nook of his character. Her doubts and fears had long since been thrust aside, and even the existence of the Indian girl had been forgotten. And so it was that when Ethel told Bill one evening she wished their wedding to take place in the camp, amid the scenes of their future hardships and happiness, he acquiesced gladly, and to the laughing outrage of her dignity picked her up in his two hands and tossed her high in the air as he would have tossed a baby. And now the time of the wedding was very near. The clean-up was finished, and day by day they awaited the coming of Appleton and Sheridan, and of Father Lapre, of the Rice Lake Mission. The men of the crew set about to make the event one long to be remembered in the Northland. Flowers were unobtainable, but a frame in the form of a giant horseshoe was constructed and covered over with pine-cones. A raid was made upon the oat-bin, and the oats sifted between the scales of the cones and moistened. The structure was placed near the stove in the bunk-house, and when the tiny, green shoots began to appear, woe to him who procrastinated in the closing of the door or neglected to tend fire when it was his turn! The walls of the grub-shack were completely hidden behind pine-branches, and festoons of brilliant red _bakneesh_ encircled the room and depended from the chains of the big, swinging lamps. In the bunk-house the men busied themselves in the polishing of buck-horns for the fashioning of a wonderful chair in whose make-up would be found neither nails nor glue, its parts being bound together by means of sinews and untanned buckskin thongs. The bateaux were set up and waiting at the head of the rollways. The snow of the forest slumped lower and lower, and innumerable icy rills found their way to the river over the surface of whose darkened, honeycombed ice flowed a shallow, slushy stream. Father Lapre arrived one morning, pink, smiling, and wet to the middle, having blundered onto thin ice in the darkness. The following morning Sheridan and Appleton appeared with mysteriously bulging packs, and weary from their three nights' battle with the slippery, ice-crusted tote-road. CHAPTER XLVII MONCROSSEN PAYS A VISIT