the bed and
turned the key in the lock. Then she went over, and, throwing up the
window to its greatest height, sat down and looked steadily toward the
north, smiling to herself.

"I can find him," she suddenly said aloud. "Of course I can find him!"

And with that she blew a kiss from her finger-tips out toward the dark
and silent North, pulled down the shade, and went quietly to bed.

CHAPTER XV

AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING

Unconsciously, by natural assimilation, so to speak, Hazel Weir had
absorbed more woodcraft than she realized in her over-winter stay in
the high latitudes. Bill Wagstaff had once told her that few people
know just what they can do until they are compelled to try, and upon
this, her second journey northward, the truth of that statement grew
more patent with each passing day. Little by little the vast central
interior of British Columbia unfolded its orderly plan of watercourses,
mountain ranges, and valleys. She passed camping places, well
remembered of that first protesting journey. And at night she could
close her eyes beside the camp fires and visualize the prodigious
setting of it all--eastward the pyramided Rockies, westward lesser
ranges, the Telegraph, the Babine; and through the plateau between the
turbulent Frazer, bearing eastward from the Rockies and turning
abruptly for its long flow south, with its sinuous doublings and
turnings that were marked in bold lines on Bill Wagstaff's map.

So trailing north with old Limping George, his fat _klootch_, and two
half-grown Siwash youths, Hazel bore steadily across country, driving
as straight as the rolling land allowed for the cabin that snuggled in
a woodsy basin close up to the peaks that guard Pine River Pass.

There came a day when brief uncertainty became sure knowledge at sight
of an L-shaped body of water glimmering through the fire-thinned
spruce. Her heart fluttered for a minute. Like a homing bird, by
grace of the rude map and Limping George, she had come to the lake
where the Indians had camped in the winter, and she could have gone
blindfolded from the lake to Roaring Bill's cabin.

On the lake shore, where the spruce ran out to birch and cottonwood,
she called a halt.

"Make camp," she instructed. "Cabin over there," she waved her hand.
"I go. Byemby come back."

Then she urged her pony through the light timber growth and across the
little meadows where the rank grass and strange varicolored flowers
wer