eyes were a bluish-gray.

For seven years, season after season, the Hudson's Bay Company's clerk
had written items something like the following in his record-books:

Feb. 17. Peter God came in to-day with his furs. He leaves this
afternoon or to-night for his trapping grounds with fresh supplies.

The year before, in a momentary fit of curiosity, the clerk had added:

Curious why Peter God never stays in Fort MacPherson overnight.

And more curious than this was the fact that Peter God never asked for
mail, and no letter ever came to Fort MacPherson for him.

The Great Barren enveloped him and his mystery. The yapping foxes knew
more of him than men. They knew him for a hundred miles up and down
that white finger of desolation; they knew the peril of his baits and
his deadfalls; they snarled and barked their hatred and defiance at the
glow of his lights on dark nights; they watched for him, sniffed for
signs of him, and walked into his clever deathpits.

The foxes and Peter God! That was what this white world was made up
of--foxes and Peter God. It was a world of strife between them. Peter
God was killing--but the foxes were winning. Slowly but surely they
were breaking him down--they and the terrible loneliness. Loneliness
Peter God might have stood for many more years. But the foxes were
driving him mad. More and more he had come to dread their yapping at
night. That was the deadly combination--night and the yapping. In the
day-time he laughed at himself for his fears; nights he sweated, and
sometimes wanted to scream. What manner of man Peter God was or might
have been, and of the strangeness of the life that was lived in the
maddening loneliness of that mystery-cabin in the edge of the Barren,
only one other man knew.

That was Philip Curtis.

Two thousand miles south, Philip Curtis sat at a small table in a
brilliantly lighted and fashionable cafe. It was early June, and Philip
had been down from the North scarcely a month, the deep tan was still
in his face, and tiny wind and snow lines crinkled at the corners of
his eyes. He exuded the life of the big outdoors as he sat opposite
pallid-cheeked and weak-chested Barrow, the Mica King, who would have
given his millions to possess the red blood in the other's veins.

Philip had made his "strike," away up on the Mackenzie. That day he had
sold out to Barrow for a hundred thousand. To-night he was filled with
the flush of joy and triumph.

Barrow's eyes