The silent places

Of the three the Indian was the first to recover.

"Bo' jou', bo' jou'," said he, calmly.

Sam collected himself to a reply. Dick said nothing, but fell behind, with his rifle across his arm. All marched on in silence to where lay the dog-sledge, guarded by May-may-gwán. The Chippewa's keen eyes took in every detail of the scene, the overturning of the sledge, the muzzling of the dogs, the general nature of the equipment. If he made any deductions, he gave no sign, nor did he evince any further astonishment at finding these men so far north at such a time of year. Only, when he thought himself unobserved, he cast a glance of peculiar intelligence at the girl, who, after a moment's hesitation, returned it.

The occasion was one of elaborate courtesy. Sam ordered tea boiled, and offered his tobacco. Over the fire he ventured a more direct inquiry than his customary policy would have advised.

"My brother is a long journey from the Missináibie."

The Chippewa assented.

"Haukemah, then, hunts these districts."

The Chippewa replied no.

"My brother has left Haukemah."

Again the Chippewa denied, but after enjoying for a moment the baffling of the old man's intentions, he volunteered information.

"The trapper of this district is my brother. I have visited him."

"It was a short visit for so long a journey. The trail is but three days old."

Ah-tek assented gravely. Evidently he cared very little whether or not his explanation was accepted.

"How many days to Winnipeg?" asked Sam.

"I have never been there," replied the Indian.

"We have summered in the region of the Missináibie," proffered Sam. "Now we go to Winnipeg."

The Indian's inscrutable countenance gave no indication as to whether or not he believed this. After a moment he knocked the ashes from his pipe and arose, casting another sharp glance at May-may-gwán. She had been busy at the sledge. Now she approached, carrying simply her own blankets and clothing.

"This man," said she to the two, "is of my people. He returns to them. I go with him."

The Chippewa twisted his feet into his snow-shoes, nodded to the white men, and swung away on the back trail in the direction whence our travellers had come. The girl, without more leave-taking, followed close at his back. For an instant the crunch of shoes splintered the frosty air. Then they rounded a bend. Silence fell swift as a hawk.

"Well, I'll be damned!" ejaculated Dick at last. "Do you think he was really up here visiting?"

"No, of course not," replied Sam. "Don't you see—"

"Then he came after the girl?"

"Good God, no!" answered Sam. "He—"

"Then he was after me," interrupted Dick again with growing excitement. "Why didn't you let me shoot him, Sam—"

"Will you shut up and listen to me?" demanded the old man, impatiently. "If he'd wanted you, he'd have got you when you were hurt last summer; and if he'd wanted the girl, he'd have got her then, too. It's all clear to me. He has been visiting a friend,—perhaps his brother, as he said,—and he did spend less than three days in the visit. What did he come for? Let me tell you! That friend, or brother, is Jingoss, and he came up here to warn him that we're after him. The Chippewa suspected us a little on the Missináibie, but he wasn't sure. Probably he's had his eye on us ever since."

"But why didn't he warn this Jingoss long ago, then?" objected Dick.

"Because we fooled him, just as we fooled all the Injuns. We might be looking for winter posts, just as we said. And then if he came up here and told Jingoss we were after him, when really we didn't know beans about Jingoss and his steals, and then this Jingoss should skip the country and leave an almighty good fur district all for nothing, that would be a nice healthy favour to do for a man, wouldn't it! No, he had to be sure before he made any moves. And he didn't get to be sure until he heard somehow from some one who saw our trails that three people were travelling in the winter up through this country. Then he piked out to warn Jingoss."

"I believe you're right!" cried Dick.

"Of course I'm right. And another thing; if that's the case we're pretty close there. How many more trappers are there in this district? Just one! And since this Chippewa is going back on his back trail within three days after he made it, he couldn't have gone farther than that one man. And that one man must be—"

"Jingoss himself!" finished Dick.

"Within a day and a half of us, anyway; probably much closer," supplemented Sam. "It's as plain as a sledge-trail."

"He's been warned," Dick reminded him.

But Sam, afire with the inspiration of inductive reasoning, could see no objection there.

"This Chippewa knew we were in the country," he argued, "but he hadn't any idea we were so close. If he had, he wouldn't have been so foolish as to follow his own back track when he was going out. I don't know what his ideas were, of course, but he was almighty surprised to see us here. He's warned this Jingoss, not more than a day or so ago. But he didn't tell him to skedaddle at once. He said, 'Those fellows are after you, and they're moseying around down south of here, and probably they'll get up here in the course of the winter. You'd probably better slide out 'till they get done.' Then he stayed a day and smoked a lot, and started back. Now, if Jingoss just thinks we're coming some time, and not to-morrow, he ain't going to pull up stakes in such a hell of a hurry. He'll pack what furs he's got, and he'll pick up what traps he's got out. That would take him several days, anyway. My son, we're in the nick of time!"

"Sam, you're a wonder," said Dick, admiringly. "I never could have thought all that out."

"If that idea's correct," went on Sam, "and the Chippewa's just come from Jingoss, why we've got the Chippewa's trail to follow back, haven't we?"

"Sure!" agreed Dick, "all packed and broken."

They righted the sledge and unbound the dogs' jaws.

"Well, we got rid of the girl," said Dick, casually. "Damn little fool. I didn't think she'd leave us that easy. She'd been with us quite a while."

"Neither did I," admitted Sam; "but it's natural, Dick. We ain't her people, and we haven't treated her very well, and I don't wonder she was sick of it and took the first chance back. We've got our work cut out for us now, and we're just as well off without her."

"The Chippewa's a sort of public benefactor all round," said Dick.

The dogs yawned prodigiously, stretching their jaws after the severe muzzling. Sam began reflectively to undo the flaps of the sledge.

"Guess we'd better camp here," said he. "It's getting pretty late and we're due for one hell of a tramp to-morrow."

Some time during the night May-may-gwán rejoined them. Sam was awakened by the demonstration of the dogs, at first hostile, then friendly with recognition. He leaped to his feet, startled at the apparition of a human figure. Dick sat up alert at once. The fire had almost died, but between the glow of its embers and the light of the aurora sifted through the trees they made her out.

"Oh, for God's sake!" snarled Dick, and lay back again in his blankets, but in a moment resumed his sitting position. "She made her choice," he proffered vehemently, "make her stick to it! Make her stick to it. She can't change her mind every other second like this, and we don't need her!"

But Sam, piling dry wood on the fire, looked in her face.

"Shut up, Dick," he commanded sharply. "Something in this."

The young man stared at his companion an enigmatical instant, hesitating as to his reply.

"Oh, all right," he replied at last with ostentatious indifference. "I don't give a damn. Don't sit up too late with the young lady. Good night!" He disappeared beneath his coverings, plainly disgruntled, as, for a greater or less period of time, he always was when even the least of his plans or points of view required readjustment.

Sam boiled tea, roasted a caribou steak, knelt and removed the girl's damp foot-gear and replaced it with fresh. Then he held the cup to her lips, cut the tough meat for her with his hunting-knife, even fed her as though she were a child. He piled more wood on the fire, he wrapped about her shoulders one of the blankets with the hare-skin lining. Finally, when nothing more remained to be done, he lit his pipe and squatted on his heels close to her, lending her mood the sympathy of human silence.

She drank the tea, swallowed the food, permitted the change of her foot-gear, bent her shoulders to the blanket, all without the appearance of consciousness. The corners of her lips were bent firmly downward. Her eyes, fixed and exalted, gazed beyond the fire, beyond the dancing shadows, beyond the world. After a long interval she began to speak, low-voiced, in short disconnected sentences.

"My brothers seek the Ojibway, Jingoss. They will take him to Conjuror's House. But Jingoss knows that my brothers come. He has been told by Ah-tek. He leaves the next sun. He is to travel to the west, to Peace River. Now his camp is five hours to the north. I know where it is. Jingoss has three dogs. He has much meat. He has no gun but the trade-gun. I have learned this. I come to tell it to my brothers."

"Why, May-may-gwán?" inquired Sam, gently.

She turned on him a look of pride.

"Have you thought I had left you for him?" she asked. "I have learned these things."

Sam uttered an exclamation of dismay.

"What?" she queried with a slow surprise.

"But he, the Chippewa," Sam pointed out, "now he knows of our presence. He will aid Jingoss; he will warn him afresh to-night!"

May-may-gwán was again rapt in sad but ex alted contemplation of something beyond. She answered merely by a contemptuous gesture.

"But—" insisted Sam.

"I know," she replied, with conviction.

Sam, troubled he knew not why, leaned forward to arrange the fire.

"How do you know, Little Sister?" he inquired, after some hesitation.

She answered by another weary gesture. Again Sam hesitated.

"Little Sister," said he, at last, "I am an old man. I have seen many years pass. They have left me some wisdom. They have made my heart good to those who are in trouble. If it was not to return to your own people, then why did you go with Ah-tek this morning?"

"That I might know what my brothers wished to know."

"And you think he told you all these things truly?" doubted Sam.

She looked directly at him.

"Little Father," said she slowly, "long has this man wanted me to live in his wigwam. For that he joined Haukemah's band;—because I was there. I have been good in his eyes. Never have I given him favour. My favour always would unlock his heart."

"But are you sure he spoke truth," objected Sam. "You have never looked kindly on him. You left Haukemah's band to go with us. How could he trust you?"

She looked at him bravely.

"Little Father," she replied, "there is a moment when man and woman trust utterly, and when they say truly what lies in their hearts."

"Good God!" cried Sam, in English.

"It was the only way," she answered the spirit of his interjection. "I had known before only his forked tongue."

"Why did you do this, girl? You had no right, no reason. You should have consulted us."

"Little Father," said she, "the people of your race are a strange people. I do not understand them. An evil is done them, and they pass it by; a good is done them, and they do not remember. With us it is different. Always in our hearts dwell the good and the evil."

"What good have we done to you?" asked Sam.

"Jibiwánisi has looked into my heart," she replied, lapsing into the Indian rhetoric of deep emotion. "He has looked into my heart, and in the doorway he blots out the world. At the first I wanted to die when he would not look on me with favour. Then I wanted to die when I thought I should never possess him. Now it is enough that I am near him, that I lay his fire, and cook his tea and caribou, that I follow his trail, that I am ready when he needs me, that I can raise my eyes and see him breaking the trail. For when I look up at him the sun breaks out, and the snow shines, and there is a light under the trees. And when I think of raising my eyes, and he not there, nor anywhere near, then my heart freezes, Little Father, freezes with loneliness."

Abruptly she arose, casting aside the blanket and stretching her arms rigid above her head. Then with equal abruptness she stooped, caught up her bedding, spread it out, and lay down stolidly to rest, turning her back to both the white men.

But Sam remained crouched by the fire until the morning hour of waking, staring with troubled eyes.

Later in the morning Dick attempted some remark on the subject of the girl's presence. At once Sam whirled on him with a gust of passion utterly unlike his ordinary deliberate and even habit.

"Shut your damned mouth!" he fairly shouted.

Dick whistled in what he thought was a new enlightenment, and followed literally the other's vigorous advice. Not a syllable did he utter for an hour, by which time the sun had risen. Then he stopped and pointed to a fresh trail converging into that they were following.

The prints of two pairs of snow-shoes joined; those of one returned.

Sam gasped. Dick looked ironical. The interpretation was plain without the need of words. The Chippewa and the girl, although they had started to the southeast, had made a long detour in order again to reach Jingoss. These two pairs of snow-shoe tracks marked where they had considered it safe again to strike into the old trail made by the Chippewa in going and coming. The one track showed where Ah-tek had pushed on to rejoin his friend; the other was that of the girl returning for some reason the night before, perhaps to throw them off the scent.

"Looks as if they'd fooled you, and fooled you good," said Dick, cheerfully.

For a single instant doubt drowned Sam's faith in his own insight and in human nature.

"Dick," said he, quietly, "raise your eyes."

Not five rods farther on the trail the two had camped for the night. Evidently Ah-tek had discovered his detour to have lasted out the day, and, having satisfied himself that his and his friend's enemies were not ahead of him, he had called a halt. The snow had been scraped away, the little fire built, the ground strewn with boughs. So far the indications were plain and to be read at a glance. But upright in the snow were two snow-shoes, and tumbled on the ground was bedding.

Instantly the two men leaped forward. May-may-gwán, her face stolid and expressionless, but her eyes glowing, stood straight and motionless by the dogs. Together they laid hold of the smoothly spread top blanket and swept it aside. Beneath was a jumble of warmer bedding. In it, his fists clenched, his eyes half open in the horrific surprise of a sudden calling, lay the Chippewa stabbed to the heart.

The silence of the grave lay over the white world. Deep in the forest a tree detonated with the frost. There by the cold last night's camp the four human figures posed, motionless as a wind that has died. Only the dogs, lolling, stretching, sending the warm steam of their breathing into the dead air, seemed to stand for the world of life, and the world of sentient creatures. And yet their very presence, unobtrusive in the forest shadows, by contrast thrust farther these others into the land of phantoms and of ghosts.

Then quietly, as with one consent, the three living ones turned away. The older woodsman stepped into the trail, leading the way for the dogs; the younger woodsman swung in behind at the gee-pole; the girl followed. Once more; slowly, as though reluctant, the forest trees resumed their silent progress past those three toiling in the treadmill of the days. The camp dropped back; it confused itself in the frost mists; it was gone, gone into the mystery and the vastness of the North, gone with its tragedy and its symbol of the greatness of human passion, gone with its one silent watcher staring at the sky, awaiting the coming of day. The frost had mercifully closed again about its revelation. No human eye would ever read that page again.

Each of the three seemed wrapped in the splendid isolation of his own dream. They strode on sightless, like somnambulists. Only mechanically they kept the trail, and why they did so they could not have told. No coherent thoughts passed through their brains. But always the trees, frost-rimed, drifted past like phantoms; always the occult influences of the North loomed large on their horizon like mirages, dwindled in the actuality, but threatened again in the bigness of mystery when they had passed. The North was near, threatening, driving the terror of her tragedy home to the hearts of these staring mechanical plodders, who now travelled they knew not why, farther and farther into the depths of dread.

But the dogs stopped, and Billy, the leader, sniffed audibly in inquiry of what lay ahead. Instantly, in the necessity for action, the spell broke. The mystery which had lain so long at their horizon, which but now had crept in, threatening to smother them, rolled back to its accustomed place. The north withheld her hand.

Before them was another camp, one that had been long used. A conical tepee or wigwam, a wide space cleared of snow, much débris, racks and scaffolds for the accommodation of supplies, all these attested long occupancy.

Sam jerked the cover from his rifle, and cast a hasty glance at the nipple to see if it was capped. Dick jumped forward and snatched aside the opening into the wigwam.

"Not at home!" said he.

"Gone," corrected Sam, pointing to a fresh trail beyond.

At once the two men turned their attention to this. After some difficulty they established the fact of a three-dog team. Testing the consistency of the snow they proved a heavy load on the toboggan.

"I'm afraid that means he's gone for good," said Sam.

They took up the trail methodically, as though no hurry existed. At the usual time of the evening they camped. Dick was for pushing on an extra hour or so, announcing himself not in the least tired, and the dogs fresh, but Sam would have none of it.

"It's going to be a long, hard pull," he said. "We're not going to catch up with him to-day, or to-morrow, or next day. It ain't a question of whether you're tired or the dogs are fresh to-night; it's a question of how you're going to be a month from now."

"We won't be able to follow him a month," objected Dick.

"Why?"

"It'll snow, and then we'll lose th' trail. The spring snows can't be far off now. They'll cover it a foot deep."

"Mebbe," agreed Sam, inconclusively.

"Besides," pursued Dick, "he'll be with his own people in less than a month, and then there won't be any trail to follow."

Whereupon Sam looked a little troubled, for this, in his mind, was the chief menace to their success. If Jingoss turned south to the Lake Superior country, he could lose himself among the Ojibways of that region; and, if all remained true to him, the white men would never again be able to get trace of him. If all remained true to him:—on the chance of that Sam was staking his faith. The Honourable the Hudson's Bay Company has been established a great many years; it has always treated its Indians justly; it enjoys a tremendous prestige for infallibility. The bonds of race are strong, but the probabilities were good that in the tribes with whom Jingoss would be forced to seek sanctuary would be some members, whose loyalty to the Company would out-balance the rather shadowy obligation to a man they had never seen before. Jingoss might be betrayed. The chances of it were fairly good. Sam Bolton knew that the Indian must be perfectly aware of this, and doubted if he would take the risk. A single man with three dogs ought to run away from three pursuers with only four. Therefore, the old woodsman thought himself justified in relying at least on the meagre opportunity a stern chase would afford.

He did not know where the Indian would be likely to lead him. The checker-board of the wilderness lay open. As he had before reflected, it would be only too easy for Jingoss to keep between himself and his pursuers the width of the game. The Northwest was wide; the plains great; the Rocky Mountains lofty and full of hiding-places,—it seemed likely he would turn west. Or the deep forests of the other coast offered unlimited opportunities of concealment,—the east might well be his choice. It did not matter particularly. Into either it would not be difficult to follow; and Sam hoped in either to gain a sight of his prize before the snow melted.

The Indian, however, after the preliminary twists and turns of indecision, turned due north. For nearly a week Sam thought this must be a ruse, or a cast by which to gain some route known to Jingoss. But the forests began to dwindle; the muskegs to open. The Land of Little Sticks could not be far distant, and beyond them was the Barren Grounds. The old woodsman knew the defaulter for a reckless and determined man. Gradually the belief, and at last the conviction, forced itself on him that here he gamed with no cautious player. The Indian was laying on the table the stakes of life or death. He, too, had realised that the test must be one of endurance, and in the superbness of his confidence he had determined not to play with preliminary half measures, but to apply at once the supreme test to himself and his antagonists. He was heading directly out into the winter desert, where existed no game but the single big caribou herd whose pastures were so wide that to meet them would be like encountering a single school of dolphins in all the seven seas.

As soon as Sam discovered this, he called Dick's attention to it.

"We're in for it," said he, "he's going to take us out on the Barren Grounds and lose us."

"If he can," supplemented Dick.

"Yes, if he can," agreed Sam. After a moment he went on, pursuing his train of thought aloud, as was his habit.

"He's thinking he has more grub than we have; that's about what it amounts to. He thinks he can tire us out. The chances are we'll find no more game. We've got to go on what we have. He's probably got a sledge-load;—and so have we;—but he has only one to feed, and three dogs, and we have three and four dogs."

"That's all right; he's our Injun," replied Dick, voicing the instinct of race superiority which, after all, does often seem to accomplish the impossible. "It's too bad we have the girl with us," he added, after a moment.

"Yes, it is," agreed Sam. Yet it was most significant that now it occurred to neither of them that she might be abandoned.

The daily supply of provisions was immediately cut to a minimum, and almost at once they felt the effects. The north demands hard work and the greatest resisting power of the vitality; the vitality calls on the body for fuel; and the body in turn insists on food. It is astonishing to see what quantities of nourishment can be absorbed without apparent effect. And when the food is denied, but the vitality is still called upon, it is equally astonishing to see how quickly it takes its revenge. Our travellers became lean in two days, dizzy in a week, tired to the last fibre, on the edge of exhaustion. They took care, however, not to step over that edge.

Sam Bolton saw to it. His was not only the bodily labour, but the mental anxiety. His attitude was the tenseness of a helmsman in a heavy wind, quivering to the faintest indication, ready to give her all she will bear, but equally ready to luff this side of disaster. Only his equable mind could have resisted an almost overpowering impulse toward sporadic bursts of speed or lengthening of hours. He had much of this to repress in Dick. But on the other hand he watched zealously against the needless waste of even a single second. Every expedient his long woods life or his native ingenuity suggested he applied at once to the problem of the greatest speed, the least expenditure of energy to a given end, the smallest consumption of food compatible with the preservation of strength. The legitimate travel of a day might amount to twenty or thirty miles. Sam added an extra five or ten to them. And that five or ten he drew from the living tissues of his very life. They were a creation, made from nothing, given a body by the individual genius of the man. The drain cut down his nervous energy, made him lean, drew the anxious lines of an incipient exhaustion across his brow.

At first, as may be gathered, the advantages of the game seemed to be strongly in the Indian's favour. The food supply, the transportation facilities, and advantage of position in case game should be encountered were all his. Against him he need count seriously only the offset of dogged Anglo-Saxon grit. But as the travel defined itself, certain compensations made themselves evident.

Direct warfare was impossible to him. He possessed only a single-barrelled muzzle-loading gun of no great efficiency. In case of ambush he might, with luck, be able to kill one of his pursuers, but he would indubitably be captured by the other. He would be unable to approach them at night because of their dogs. His dog-team was stronger, but with it he had to break trail, which the others could utilise without further effort. Even should his position in advance bring him on game, without great luck, he would be unable to kill it, for he was alone and could not leave his team for long. And his very swiftness in itself would react against him, for he was continually under the temptation daily to exceed by a little his powers.

These considerations the white men at first could not see; and so, logically, they were more encouraged by them when at last they did appear. And then in turn, by natural reaction when the glow had died, the great discouragement of the barren places fell on their spirits. They plodded, seeing no further than their daily necessity of travel. They plodded, their eyes fixed to the trail, which led always on toward the pole star, undeviating, as a deer flies in a straight line hoping to shake off the wolves.

The dense forest growth was succeeded in time by the low spruce and poplar thickets; these in turn by the open reaches planted like a park with the pointed firs. Then came the Land of Little Sticks, and so on out into the vast whiteness of the true North, where the trees are liliputian and the spaces gigantic beyond the measures of the earth; where living things dwindle to the significance of black specks on a limitless field of white, and the aurora crackles and shoots and spreads and threatens like a great inimical and magnificent spirit.

The tendency seemed toward a mighty simplification, as though the complexities of the world were reverting toward their original philosophic unity. The complex summer had become simple autumn; the autumn, winter; now the very winter itself was apparently losing its differentiations of bushes and trees, hills and valleys, streams and living things. The growths were disappearing; the hills were flattening toward the great northern wastes; the rare creatures inhabiting these barrens took on the colour of their environment. The ptarmigan matched the snow,—the fox,—the ermine. They moved either invisible or as ghosts.

Little by little such dwindling of the materials for diverse observation, in alliance with the too-severe labour and the starving, brought about a strange concentration of ideas. The inner world seemed to undergo the same process of simplification as the outer. Extraneous considerations disappeared. The entire cosmos of experience came to be an expanse of white, themselves, and the Trail. These three reacted one on the other, and outside of them there was no reaction.

In the expanse of white was no food: their food was dwindling; the Trail led on into barren lands where no food was to be had. That was the circle that whirled insistent in their brains.

At night they sank down, felled by the sheer burden of weariness, and no matter how exhausted they might be the Trail continued, springing on with the same apparently tireless energy toward its unknown goal in the North. Gradually they lost sight of the ultimate object of their quest. It became obscured by the immediate object, and that was the following of the Trail. They forgot that a man had made it, or if for a moment it did occur to them that it was the product of some agency outside of and above itself, that agent loomed vaguely as a mysterious, extra-human power, like the winds or the cold or the great Wilderness itself. It did not seem possible that he could feel the need for food, for rest, that ever his vital forces could wane. In the north was starvation for them, a starvation to which they drew ever nearer day by day, but irresistibly the notion obsessed them that this forerunner, the forerunner of the Trail, proved no such material necessities, that he drew his sustenance from his environment in some mysterious manner not to be understood. Always on and on and on the Trail was destined to lead them until they died, and then the maker of it,—not Jingoss, not the Weasel, the defaulter, the man of flesh and blood and nerves and thoughts and the capacities for suffering,—but a being elusive as the aurora, an embodiment of that dread country, a servant of the unfriendly North, would return as he had done.

Over the land lay silence. The sea has its undertone on the stillest nights; the woods are quiet with an hundred lesser noises; but here was absolute, terrifying, smothering silence,—the suspension of all sound, even the least,—looming like a threatening cloud larger and more dreadful above the cowering imagination. The human soul demanded to shriek aloud in order to preserve its sanity, and yet a whisper uttered over against the heavy portent of this universal stillness seemed a profanation that left the spirit crouched beneath a fear of retribution. And then suddenly the aurora, the only privileged voice, would crackle like a silken banner.

At first the world in the vastness of its spaces seemed to become bigger and bigger. Again abruptly it resumed its normal proportions, but they, the observers of it, had been struck small. To their own minds they seemed like little black insects crawling painfully. In the distance these insects crawled was a disproportion to the energy expended, a disproportion disheartening, filling the soul with the despair of an accomplishment that could mean anything in the following of that which made the Trail.

Always they ate pemmican. Of this there remained a fairly plentiful supply, but the dog meat was running low. It was essential that the team be well fed. Dick or Sam often travelled the entire day a quarter of a mile one side or the other, hoping thus to encounter game, but without much success. A fox or so, a few plarmigan, that was all. These they saved for the dogs. Three times a day they boiled tea and devoured the little square of pemmican. It did not supply the bulk their digestive organs needed, and became in time almost nauseatingly unpalatable, but it nourished. That, after all, was the main thing. The privation carved the flesh from their muscles, carved the muscles themselves to leanness.

But in spite of the best they could do, the dog feed ran out. There remained but one thing to do. Already the sledge was growing lighter, and three dogs would be quite adequate for the work. They killed Wolf, the surly and stupid "husky." Every scrap they saved, even to the entrails, which froze at once to solidity. The remaining dogs were put on half rations, just sufficient to keep up their strength. The starvation told on their tempers. Especially did Claire, the sledge-dog, heavy with young, and ravenous to feed their growth, wander about like a spirit, whining mournfully and sniffing the barren breeze.

The journey extended over a month. The last three weeks of it were starvation. At first this meant merely discomfort and the bearing of a certain amount of pain. Later it became acute suffering. Later still it developed into a necessity for proving what virtue resided in the bottom of these men's souls.

Perforce now they must make a choice of what ideas they would keep. Some things must be given up, just as some things had to be discarded when they had lightened the sledge. All the lesser lumber had long since gone. Certain bigger things still remained.

They held grimly to the idea of catching the Indian. Their natural love of life held tenaciously to a hope of return. An equally natural hope clung to the ridiculous idea that the impossible might happen, that the needle should drop from the haystack, that the caribou might spring into their view from the emptiness of space. Now it seemed that they must make a choice between the first two.

"Dick," said Bolton, solemnly, "we've mighty little pemmican left. If we turn around now, it'll just about get us back to the woods. If we go on farther, we'll have to run into more food, or we'll never get out."

"I knew it," replied Dick.

"Well?"

Dick looked at him astonished. "Well, what?" he inquired.

"Shall we give it up?"

"Give it up!" cried the young man. "Of course not; what you thinking of?"

"There's the caribou," suggested Sam, doubtfully; "or maybe Jingoss has more grub than he's going to need. It's a slim chance."

They still further reduced the ration of pemmican. The malnutrition began to play them tricks. It dizzied their brains, swarmed the vastness with hordes of little, dancing black specks like mosquitoes. In the morning every muscle of their bodies was stiffened to the consistency of rawhide, and the movements necessary to loosen the fibres became an agony hardly to be endured. Nothing of voluntary consciousness remained, could remain, but the effort of lifting the feet, driving the dogs, following the Trail; but involuntary consciousness lent them strange hallucinations. They saw figures moving across the snow, but when they steadied their vision, nothing was there.

They began to stumble over nothing; occasionally to fall. In this was added effort, but more particularly added annoyance. They had continually to watch their footsteps. The walking was no longer involuntary, but they had definitely to think of each movement necessary to the step, and this gave them a further reason for preoccupation, for concentration. Dick's sullenness returned, more terrible than in the summer. He went forward with his head down, refusing to take notice of anything. He walked: that was to him the whole of existence.

Once reverting analogously to his grievance of that time, he mentioned the girl, saying briefly that soon they must all die, and it was better that she die now. Perhaps her share of the pemmican would bring them to their quarry. The idea of return—not abandoned, but persistently ignored—thrust into prominence this other,—to come to close quarters with the man they pursued, to die grappled with him, dragging him down to the same death by which these three perished. But Sam would have none of it, and Dick easily dropped the subject, relapsing into his grim monomania of pursuit.

In Dick's case even the hope of coming to grapples was fading. He somehow had little faith in his enemy. The man was too intangible, too difficult to gauge. Dick had not caught a glimpse of the Indian since the pursuit began. The young man realised perfectly his own exhaustion; but he had no means of knowing whether or not the Indian was tiring. His faith waned, though his determination did not. Unconsciously he substituted this monomania of pursuit. It took the place of the faith he felt slipping from him—the faith that ever he would see the fata morgana luring him out into the Silent Places.

Soon it became necessary to kill another dog. Dick, with a remnant of his old feeling, pleaded for the life of Billy, his pet. Sam would not entertain for a moment the destruction of the hound. There remained only Claire, the sledge-dog, with her pathetic brown eyes, and her affectionate ways of the female dog. They went to kill her, and discovered her in the act of defending the young to which she had just given birth. Near at hand crouched Mack and Billy, their eyes red with famine, their jaws a-slaver, eager to devour the newborn puppies. And in the grim and dreadful sight Sam Bolton seemed at last to glimpse the face of his terrible antagonist.

They beat back the dogs, and took the puppies. These they killed and dressed. Thus Claire's life was bought for her by the sacrifice of her progeny.

But even that was a temporary respite. She fell in her turn, and was devoured, to the last scrap of her hide. Dick again intervened to save Billy, but failed. Sam issued his orders the more peremptorily as he felt his strength waning, and realised the necessity of economising every ounce of it, even to that required in the arguing of expedients. Dick yielded with slight resistance, as he had yielded in the case of the girl. All matters but the one were rapidly becoming unimportant to him. That concentration of his forces which represented the weapon of his greatest utility, was gradually taking place. He was becoming an engine of dogged determination, an engine whose burden the older man had long carried on his shoulders, but which now he was preparing to launch when his own strength should be gone.

At last there was left but the one dog, Mack, the hound, with the wrinkled face and the long, hanging ears. He developed unexpected endurance and an entire willingness, pulling strongly on the sledge, waiting in patience for his scanty meal, searching the faces of his masters with his wise brown eyes, dumbly sympathetic in a trouble whose entirety he could not understand.

The two men took turns in harnessing themselves to the sledge with Mack. The girl followed at the gee-pole.

May-may-gwán showed the endurance of a man. She made no complaint. Always she followed, and followed with her mind alert. Where Dick shut obstinately his faculties within the bare necessity of travel, she and her other companion were continually alive to the possibilities of expedient. This constituted an additional slight but constant drain on their vital forces.

Starvation gained on them. Perceptibly their strength was waning. Dick wanted to kill the other dog. His argument was plausible. The toboggan was now very light. The men could draw it. They would have the dog-meat to recruit their strength.

Sam shook his head. Dick insisted. He even threatened force. But then the woodsman roused his old-time spirit and fairly beat the young man into submission by the vehemence of his anger. The effort left him exhausted. He sank back into himself, and refused, in the apathy of weariness, to give any explanation.

By now it was the first week in March. The weather began to assume a new aspect. During the winter months it had not snowed, for the moisture had all been squeezed from the air, leaving it crisp, brilliant, sparkling. Now the sun, long hesitant, at last began to swing up the sky. Far south the warmer airs of spring were awakening the Kansas fields. Here in the barren country the steel sky melted to a haze. During the day, when the sun was up, the surface of the snow even softened a little, and a very perceptible warmth allowed them to rest, their parkas thrown back, without discomfort.

The men noticed this, and knew it as the precursor of the spring snow-fall. Dick grew desperately uneasy, desperately anxious to push on, to catch up before the complete obliteration of the trail, when his resources would perforce run out for lack of an object to which to apply them. He knew perfectly well that this must be what the Indian had anticipated, the reason why he had dared to go out into the barren grounds, and to his present helpless lack of a further expedient the defaulter's confidence in the natural sequence seemed only too well justified. Sam remained inscrutable.

The expected happened late one afternoon. All day the haze had thickened, until at last, without definite transition, it had become a cloud covering the entire sky. Then it had snowed. The great, clogging flakes sifted down gently, ziz-zagging through the air like so many pieces of paper. They impacted softly against the world, standing away from each other and from the surface on which they alighted by the full stretch of their crystal arms. In an hour three inches had fallen. The hollows and depressions were filling to the level; the Trail was growing indistinct.

Dick watched from the shelter of a growing despair. Never had he felt so helpless. This thing was so simple, yet so effective; and nothing he could do would nullify its results. As sometimes in a crisis a man will give his whole attention to a trivial thing, so Dick fastened his gaze on a single snow-shoe track on the edge of a covered bowlder. By it he gauged the progress of the storm. When at last even his imagination could not differentiate it from the surface on either side, he looked up. The visible world was white and smooth and level. No faintest trace of the Trail remained. East, west, north, south, lay uniformity. The Indian had disappeared utterly from the face of the earth.

The storm lightened and faint streaks of light shot through the clouds.

"Well, let's be moving," said Sam.

"Moving where?" demanded Dick, bitterly. But the old man led forward the hound.

"Remember the lake where we lost the track of that Chippewa?" he inquired. "Well, a foot of light snow is nothing. Mush on, Mack!"

The hound sniffed deep, filling his nostrils with the feather snow, which promptly he sneezed out. Then he swung off easily on his little dog-trot, never at fault, never hesitant, picking up the turns and twistings of the Indian's newer purpose as surely as a mind-reader the concealed pin.