chorus of the caribou song. He heard the distant snapping of a whip,
the yelping response of huskies, and a moment later a sledge and six
dogs passed him so close that he was compelled to leap from their path.
This was Le Pas--the wilderness! Beyond it, just over the frozen river
which lay white and silent before him, stretched that endless desolation
of romance and mystery which he had grown to love, a world of deep
snows, of silent-tongued men, of hardship and battle for life where the
law of nature was the survival of the fittest, and that of man, "Do
unto others as ye would that they should do unto you." Never did Philip
Steele's heart throb with the wild, free pulse of life and joy as in
such moments as these, when his fortune, his clubs, and his friends
were a thousand miles away, and he stood on the edge of the big northern
Unknown.

As he had slept through the trainmen's dinner hour, he was as hungry as
a wolf, and he lost no time in seating himself in a warm corner of the
low, log-ceilinged dining-room of the Little Saskatchewan. Although a
quarter of an hour early, he had hardly placed himself at his table when
another person entered the room. Casually he glanced up from the two
letters which he had spread out before him. The one who had followed him
was a woman. She had turned sharply upon seeing him and seated herself
at the next table, her back so toward him that he caught only her half
profile.

It was enough to assure him that she was young and pretty. On her head
she wore a turban of silver lynx fur, and about this she had drawn her
glossy brown hair, which shone like burnished copper in the lamp-glow,
and had gathered it in a bewitchingly coquettish knot low on her neck,
where it shone with a new richness and a new warmth with every turn of
her head. But not once did she turn so that Philip could see more than
the tantalizing pink of her cheek and the prettiness of her chin, which
at times was partly concealed in a collarette of the same silver gray
lynx fur.

He ate his supper almost mechanically, in spite of his hunger, for his
mind was deep in the mysterious problem which confronted him. Half a
dozen times he broke in upon his thoughts to glance at the girl at the
opposite table. Once he was sure that she had been looking at him and
that she had turned just in time to keep her face from him. Philip
admired pretty women, and of all beauty in woman he loved beautiful
hair, so that more and more freq