int it hurt. He must get up, for all that, and reached the top,
where he sat down with his lips firmly set, and after putting on the
coat felt in the pocket for a cigarette.

The case he took out was not his, and he remembered that he was wearing
another man's coat. The cigarettes were of Turkish tobacco, which is
not much used in Canada, and he thought the quality remarkably good.
This seemed to imply that their owner had a cultivated taste, and
Foster began to wonder whether he was after all not a business man
running away from his creditors, but rejected the theory. It was
strange that although the cigarettes were expensive the case was of the
kind sold in Western stores for fifty cents, but Foster presently gave
up speculating about the man.

The moon was getting low and ragged pine branches cut against the
light. The track was wrapped in shadow that was only a little less
dense than the gloom of the surrounding bush. It was not really cold
for North Ontario, but the fur coat was hardly enough protection to
make a bed in the open air comfortable. Foster had slept in the
Athabasca forests when the thermometer marked forty degrees below zero,
but he then wore different clothes and had been able to make a roaring
fire and build a snow-bank between him and the wind. Moreover, he was
still liable to be overtaken by the men on the train.

Getting up, he found his knee sore and stiff, but limped on for an hour
or two after the moon sank. He seemed to be stumbling along the bottom
of a dark trench, for the firs shut him in like a wall and there was
only an elusive glimmer of light above their serrated tops. He did not
expect to find a house until he reached the station, for much of North
Ontario is a wilderness where the trees are too small for milling and
agriculture is impossible among the rocks. To make things worse, he
felt hungry. The train had stopped at about seven o'clock at a
desolate station where the passengers were given a few minutes to get
supper, but Foster's portion was too hot for him to eat. He tried to
encourage himself by remembering that he had once marched three hundred
miles across the snow with a badly frozen foot, but this did not make
his present exertion easier.

As he got hungry he got angry. He had gone away to enjoy himself, and
this was how his holiday had begun! The Government agent, if that was
what he was, ought not to have dragged a confiding stranger into his
difficultie