d stunted scrub, and the sight of it gave him a little hope. Hope died
when he reached the top and stared out over a mile of lifeless barren.

"You're my only chance. Billy," he shivered. "Mebby, if you knew what
had happened, you'd turn back and give me the loan of a match."

He tried to laugh at his own little joke, but it was a ghastly attempt
and his purpling lips closed tightly as he stumbled down the ridge. As
his legs grew weaker and his blood more sluggish, his mind seemed to
work faster, and the multitude of thoughts that surged through his brain
made him oblivious of the first gnawing of a strange dull pain. He was
freezing. He knew that without feeling pain. He had before him, not
hours, but minutes of life, and he knew that, too. His arms might have
been cut off at the shoulders for all feeling that was left in them; he
noticed, as he stumbled along in a half run, that he could not bend
his fingers. At every step his legs grew heavier and his feet were now
leaden weights. Yet he was surprised to find that the first horror of
his situation had left him. It did not seem that death was only a few
hundred yards away, and he found himself thinking of MacGregor, of home,
and then only of Isobel. He wondered, after that, if some one of the
other four had played the game, and lost, in this same way, and he
wondered, too, if his bones would never be found, as theirs had never
been.

He stopped again on a snow ridge. He had come a quarter of a mile,
though it seemed that he had traveled ten times that distance.

"Sixty degrees below zero--and it's the vindication of the law!"

His voice scarcely broke between his purple lips now, and the bitter
sweep of wind swayed him as he stood.

Chapter XI. The Law Versus The Man

Suddenly a great thrill shot through Philip, and for an instant he stood
rigid. What was that he saw out in the gray gloom of Arctic desolation,
creeping up, up, up, almost black at its beginning, and dying away like
a ghostly winding-sheet? A gurgling cry rose in his throat, and he went
on, panting now like a broken-winded beast in his excitement. It grew
near, blacker, warmer. He fancied that he could feel its heat, which was
the new fire of life blazing within him.

He went down between two great drifts into a pit which seemed
bottomless. He crawled to the top of the second, using his pulseless
hands like sticks in the snow, and at the top something rose from the
other side of the drift to