he
was voluntarily taking a desperate chance. For reasons which he had
arrived at during the night he had left his dogs and sledge with
Pierre, and was traveling light. In his forty-pound pack, fitted snugly
to his shoulders, were a three pound silk service-tent that was
impervious to the fiercest wind, and an equal weight of cooking
utensils. The rest of his burden, outside of his rifle, his Colt's
revolver and his ammunition, was made up of rations, so much of which
was scientifically compressed into dehydrated and powder form that he
carried on his back, in a matter of thirty pounds, food sufficient for
a month if he provided his meat on the trail. The chief article in this
provision was fifteen pounds of flour; four dozen eggs he carried in
one pound of egg powder; twenty-eight pounds of potatoes in four pounds
of the dehydrated article; four pounds of onions in a quarter of a
pound of the concentration, and so on through the list.

He laughed a little grimly as he thought of this concentrated
efficiency in the pack on his shoulders. In a curious sort of way it
reminded him of other days, and he wondered what some of his old-time
friends would say if he could, by some magic endowment, assemble them
here for a feast on the trail. He wondered especially what Mignon
Davenport would say--and do. P-f-f-f! He could see the blue-blooded
horror in her aristocratic face! That wind from over the Barren would
curdle the life in her veins. She would shrivel up and die. He
considered himself a fairly good judge in the matter, for once upon a
time he thought that he was going to marry her. Strange why he should
think of her now, he told himself; but for all that he could not get
rid of her for a time. And thinking of her, his mind traveled back into
the old days, even as he followed over the hidden trail of Bram.
Undoubtedly a great many of his old friends had forgotten him. Five
years was a long time, and friendship in the set to which he belonged
was not famous for its longevity. Nor love, for that matter. Mignon had
convinced him of that. He grimaced, and in the teeth of the wind he
chuckled. Fate was a playful old chap. It was a good joke he had played
on him--first a bit of pneumonia, then a set of bad lungs afflicted
with that "galloping" something-or-other that hollows one's cheeks and
takes the blood out of one's veins. It was then that the horror had
grown larger and larger each day in Mignon's big baby-blue eyes, until