ouded swamp. But no sounds came to
them through the motionless air, and after an hour of stealthy advance,
they drew into the shelter of a huge spruce and peered through the
interstices of its snow-laden branches toward the log stockade that
Lapierre had thrown across the neck of his lofty peninsula.

Silent and grey and deserted loomed the barrier so cunningly devised as
to be almost indistinguishable at a distance of fifty yards. Snow lay
upon its top, and vertical ridges of snow clung to the crevices of the
upstanding palings.

A half-hour passed, while the two men remained motionless, and then,
satisfied that the fort was unoccupied, they stepped cautiously from
the shelter of their tree. The next instant, loud and clear,
shattering the intense silence with one sharp explosion of sound, rang
a shot. And Corporal Ripley, who was following close at the heels of
MacNair, staggered, clawed wildly for the butt of his service revolver
which protruded from its holster, and, with an imprecation on his lips
that ended in an unintelligible snarl, crashed headlong into the snow.

MacNair whirled as if upon a pivot, and with hardly a glance at the
prostrate form, dashed over the back-trail with the curious lumbering
strides of the man who would hurry on rackets. He had jerked off his
heavy mitten at the sound of the shot, and his bared hand clutched
firmly the butt of a blue-black automatic. A spruce-branch, suddenly
relieved of its snow, sprang upward with a swish, thirty yards away.
MacNair fired three times in rapid succession.

There was no answering shot, and he leaped forward, charging directly
toward the tree that concealed the hidden foe before the man could
reload; for by the roar of its discharge, MacNair knew that the weapon
was an old Hudson Bay muzzle-loading smoothbore--a primitive weapon of
the old North, but in the hands of an Indian, a weapon of terrible
execution at short range, where a roughly moulded bullet or a slug
rudely hammered from the solder melted from old tin cans tears its way
through the flesh, driven by three fingers of black powder.

Near the tree MacNair found the gun where its owner had hurled it into
the snow--found also the tracks of a pair of snowshoes, which headed
into the heart of the black spruce swamp. The tracks showed at a
glance that the lurking assassin was an Indian, that he was travelling
light, and that the chance of running him down was extremely remote.
Whereupon M