before Blake and the two Eskimos reappeared
with a bag of fish and a big bundle of ship-timber kindlings. Dolores
stood with a mittened hand on Peter's shoulder, and bending down, she
whispered:

"Peter, if you love me, don't mind what I'm going to say now. Don't
move, for everything is going to be all right, and if you should try to
get up or roll off the sledge, it would be so much harder for me. I
haven't even told you why we're going to Port Confidence. Now you'll
know!"

She straightened up to face Blake. She had chosen her position, and
Blake was standing clear and unshadowed in the starlight half a dozen
paces from her. She had thrust her hood back a little, inspired by her
feminine instinct to let him see her contempt for him.

"You beast!"

The words hissed hot and furious from her lips, and in that same
instant Blake found himself staring straight into the unquivering
muzzle of her revolver.

"You beast!" she repeated. "I ought to kill you. I ought to shoot you
down where you stand, for you are a cur and a coward. I know what you
have planned. I followed you when you went to Rydal's cabin a little
while ago, and I heard everything that passed between you. Listen,
Peter, and I'll tell you what these brutes were going to do with us.
You were to go with the six-dog team and I with the five, and out on
the barrens we were to become separated, you to go on and be killed
when you we're a proper distance away, and I to be brought back--to
Rydal. Do you understand, Peter dear? Isn't it splendid that we should
have forced on us like this such wonderful material for a story!"

She was gloriously unafraid now. A paean of triumph rang in her voice,
triumph, contempt, and utter fearlessness. Her mittened hand pressed on
Peter's shoulder, and before the weapon in her other hand Blake stood
as if turned into stone.

"You don't know," she said, speaking to him directly, "how near I am to
killing you. I think I shall shoot unless you have the meat and
kindlings put on Peter's sledge immediately and give Uppy
instructions--in English--to drive us to Fort Confidence. Peter and I
will both go with the six-dog sledge. Give the instructions quickly,
Mr. Blake!"

Blake, recovering from the shock she had given him, flashed back at her
his cool and cynical smile. In spite of being caught in an unpleasant
lie, he admired this golden-haired, blue-eyed slip of a woman for the
colossal bluff she was playing. "Personally, I'm s