ton of a caribou, and the bones of a fox with one shank still
gripped in the jaws of a rusty trap. He found a large dry cave in the
side of a knoll. He found the charred butts of an old camp-fire and near
it that which had once been a plug of tobacco--a brown, rotten mass,
smelling of dead leaves and wet rags. He found a rusted fish-hook, so
thorough was his search--aye, and a horn button. In such signs he read
the fleeting history of the passing of generations of men that way--of
men from Chance Along who had sought in this wilderness for flesh for
their pots and timber for their huts, boats and stages. He found
everything but what he was looking for--the frozen body of Foxey Jack
Quinn with the necklace of diamonds and rubies in its pocket. Then a
haunting fear came to him that the thief had escaped--had won out to the
big world in spite of the storm and by some other course than Witless
Bay.

With this fear in him, he carried on terribly for a few minutes, raging
around his fire, cursing the name and the soul of Foxey Jack Quinn,
calling upon the saints for justice, confounding his luck and his
enemies. He stopped it suddenly, for he had a way of regaining command
of his threshing passions all at once. He did not have to let them
thresh themselves out, as is the case with weaker men; but he gripped
them, full-blooded, to quiet, by sheer will power and a turn of thought.
The force of mastery was strong in Black Dennis Nolan's wild nature.
When he wished it he could master himself as well as others. Now he sat
down quietly beside his fire and lit his pipe. The evening was near at
hand--the evening of the third and last day of his exile. The sun, like
a small round window of red glass, hung low above the black hills to the
north and west. He got to his feet, threw snow on the breaking fire and
scattered the steaming coals with his foot. Then he pulled down his
shelter and threw the poles and spruce branches into a thicket, so that
no marks of his encampment were left except the wet coals and smudged
ashes of the fire.

The crimson sun slid down out of sight behind the black hills to the
west and north, and the gray twilight thickened over the wilderness. The
last red tint had faded from the west and the windows of the cabins
were glowing when the skipper reached the top of the path leading down
to Chance Along. A dog barked--Pat Kavanagh's black crackie--and the
whisper of the tide fumbling at edges of ice came up from