g beams setting everything aglitter. Frost
particles vibrated in the air, coruscating diamond dust. Underfoot, on
the path beaten betwixt house and stable, the snow crunched and
complained as they walked, and in the open where the mad winds had
piled it in hard, white windrows. But in the thick woods it lay as it
had fallen, full five foot deep, a downy wrapping for the slumbering
earth, over which Bill Wagstaff flitted on his snowshoes as silently as
a ghost--a fur-clad ghost, however, who bore a rifle on his shoulder,
and whose breath exhaled in white, steamy puffs.

Gold or no gold, the wild land was giving up its treasure to them.
Already the catch of furs totaled ninety marten, a few mink, a dozen
wolves--and two pelts of that rara avis, the silver fox. Around twelve
hundred dollars, Bill estimated, with four months yet to trap. And the
labor of tending the trap lines, of skinning and stretching the catch,
served to keep them both occupied--Hazel as much as he, for she went
out with him on all but the hardest trips. So that their isolation in
the hushed, white world where the frost ruled with an iron hand had not
so far become oppressive. They were too busy to develop that dour
affliction of the spirit which loneliness and idleness breed through
the long winters of the North.

A day or two after the first of the year Roaring Bill set out to go
over one of the uttermost trap lines. Five minutes after closing the
door he was back.

"Easy with that fire, little person," he cautioned. "She's blowing out
of the northwest again. The sparks are sailing pretty high. Keep your
eye on it, Hazel."

"All right, Billum," she replied. "I'll be careful."

Not more than fifty yards separated the house and stable. At the
stable end stood the stack of hay, a low hummock above the surrounding
drift. Except for the place where Bill daily removed the supply for
his horses there was not much foothold for a spark, since a thin coat
of snow overlaid the greater part of the top. But there was that
chance of catastrophe. The chimney of their fireplace yawned wide to
the sky, vomiting sparks and ash like a miniature volcano when the fire
was roughly stirred, or an extra heavy supply of dry wood laid on.
When the wind whistled out of the northwest the line of flight was fair
over the stack. It behooved them to watch wind and fire. By keeping a
bed of coals and laying on a stick or two at a time a gale might roar
across