at the significance of things he pointed out quickly the
tremendous hazard of their position. There were many more dogs and
other sledges at Blake's place, and it was utterly inconceivable that
Blake and Captain Rydal would permit them to reach Fort Confidence
without making every effort in their power to stop them. Once they
succeeded in placing certain facts in the hands of the Mounted Police,
both Rydal and Blake would be done for. He impressed this uncomfortable
truth on Dolores and suggested that if she could have smuggled a rifle
along in the dunnage sack it would have helped matters considerably.
For Rydal and Blake would not hesitate at shooting. For them it must be
either capture or kill--death for him, anyway, for he was the one
factor not wanted in the equation. He summed up their chances and their
danger calmly and pointedly, as he always looked at troubling things.
And Dolores felt her heart sinking within her. After all, she had not
handled the situation any too well. She almost wished she had killed
Rydal herself and called it self-defense. At least she had been
criminally negligent in not smuggling along a rifle.

"But we'll beat them out," she argued hopefully. "We've got a splendid
team, Peter, and I'll take off my coat and run behind the sledge as
much as I can. Uppy won't dare play a trick on us now, for he knows
that if I should miss him, Wapi would tear the life out of him at a
word from me. We'll win out, Peter dear. See if we don't!"

Peter hugged his thoughts to himself. He did not tell her that Blake
and Rydal would pursue with a ten- or twelve-dog team, and that there
was almost no chance at all of a straight get-away. Instead, he pulled
her head down and kissed her.

To Wapi there had come at last a response to the great yearning that
was in him. Instinct, summer and winter, had drawn him south, had
turned him always in that direction, filled with the uneasiness of the
mysterious something that was calling to him through the years of forty
generations of his kind. And now he was going south. He sensed the fact
that this journey would not end at the edge of the Arctic plain and
that he was not to hunt caribou or bear. His mental formulae
necessitated no process of reasoning. They were simple and to the point
His world had suddenly divided itself into two parts; one contained the
woman, and the other his old masters and slavery. And the woman stood
against these masters. They were her enemies