er two up here. They
were like you--hunting me down, and I killed 'em in fair fight. Was that
murder? Should I stand by and be shot like an animal just because it's
the law that's doing it? Would you?"

He rose without waiting for an answer and felt of the clothes beside the
fire.

"Dry enough," he said. "Put 'em on and we'll be hiking."

Philip dressed, and looked at his compass.

"Still north?" he asked. "Chippewayan is south and west."

"North," said DeBar. "I know of a breed who lives on Red Porcupine
Creek, which runs into the Slave. If we can find him we'll get grub, and
if we don't--"

He laughed openly into the other's face.

"We won't fight," said Philip, understanding him.

"No, we won't fight, but we'll wrap up in the same blankets, and die,
with Woonga, there, keeping our backs warm until the last. Eh, Woonga,
will you do that?"

He turned cheerily to the dog, and Woonga rose slowly and with
unmistakable stiffness of limb, and was fastened in the sledge traces.

They went on through the desolate gloom of afternoon, which in late
winter is, above the sixtieth, all but night. Ahead of them there seemed
to rise billow upon billow of snow-mountains, which dwarfed themselves
into drifted dunes when they approached, and the heaven above them, and
the horizon on all sides of them were shut out from their vision by a
white mist which was intangible and without substance and yet which rose
like a wall before their eyes. It was one chaos of white mingling with
another chaos of white, a chaos of white earth smothered and torn by
the Arctic wind under a chaos of white sky; and through it all, saplings
that one might have twisted and broken over his knee were magnified into
giants at a distance of half a hundred paces, and men and dog looked
like huge specters moving with bowed heads through a world that was no
longer a world of life, but of dead and silent things. And up out of
this, after a time, rose DeBar's voice, chanting in tones filled with
the savagery of the North, a wild song that was half breed and half
French, which the forest men sing in their joy when coming very near to
home.

They went on, hour after hour, until day gloom thickened into night,
and night drifted upward to give place to gray dawn, plodding steadily
north, resting now and then, fighting each mile of the way to the Red
Porcupine against the stinging lashes of the Arctic wind. And through it
all it was DeBar's voice that rose in