m quit? No, by God!"

The men stood watching his face, curiously twisted and quivering. Then
without a word Duff seized his pack, and swung into the trail, every
man following him in his order. Without pausing, except for a brief half
hour at noon, and another later in the day for eating, they pressed the
trail, running what rapids they could and portaging the others, until in
the early evening they saw, far away, a dirty blur on the skyline.

"Hurrah!" yelled Fielding. "Good old firebus, waiting for us."

"Somebody run ahead and hold her," said Duff.

Barry flung his pack down and started away.

"Come back here, Barry," cried Knight. "You're not fit. You're all in."

"That's right, too," said McCuaig. "I guess I'll go."

And off he set with the long, shuffling, tireless trot with which, for
a hundred years, the "runners of the woods" have packed their loads and
tracked their game in the wilds of northwestern Canada.

CHAPTER VII

BARRICADES AND BAYONETS

The city of Edmonton was in an uproar, its streets thronged with
excited men, ranchers and cowboys from the ranches, lumberjacks from the
foothill camps, men from the mines, trappers with lean, hard faces, in
weird garb, from the north.

The news from the front was ominous. Belgium was a smoking waste. Her
skies were black with the burning of her towns, villages and homesteads,
her soil red with the blood of her old men, her women and children. The
French armies, driven back in rout from the Belgian frontier, were being
pounded to death by the German hordes. Fortresses hitherto considered
impregnable were tumbling like ninepins before the terrible smashing of
Austrian and German sixteen-inch guns. Already von Kluck with his four
hundred thousand of conquering warriors was at the gates of Paris.

Most ominous of all, the British army, that gallant, little sacrificial
army, of a scant seventy-five thousand men, holding like a bulldog to
the flank of von Bulow's mighty army, fifty times as strong, threatened
by von Kluck on the left flank and by von Housen on the right, was
slowing down the German advance, but was itself being slowly ground
into the bloody dust of the northern and eastern roads of Northern and
Eastern France.

Black days these were for the men of British blood. Was the world to
see something new in war? Were Germans to overcome men of the race of
Nelson, and Wellington and Colin Campbell?

At home, hundreds of thousands were batterin