the words of Jean Croisset: "M'seur, I
know of a hundred men between Athabasca and the bay who would kill you
for what you have said." Yes, she would go into the North. Somewhere in
that vast desolation of which Jean had spoken he would find her, even
though he spent half of his life in the search!

It was past midnight when he spread out the furs and undressed for bed.
He opened the stove door and from the bunk watched the faint flickerings
of the dying firelight on the log walls. As slumber closed his eyes he
was conscious of a sound--the faint, hungerful, wailing cry to which he
had listened that first night near Prince Albert. It was a wolf, and
drowsily he wondered how he could hear the cry through the thick log
walls of his prison. The answer came to him the moment he opened his
eyes, hours later. A bit of pale sunlight was falling into the room and
he saw that it entered through a narrow aperture close up to the
ceiling. After he had prepared his breakfast he dragged the table under
this aperture and by standing on it was enabled to peer through. A
hundred yards away was the black edge of the spruce and balsam forest.
Between him and the forest, half smothered in the deep snow, was a
cabin, and he shuddered as he saw floating over it the little red signal
of death of which Croisset had told him the night before.

With the breaking of this day the hours seemed of interminable length.
For a time he amused himself by searching every corner and crevice of
his prison room, but he found nothing of interest beyond what he had
already discovered. He examined the door which Croisset had barred on
him, and gave up all hope of escape in that direction. He could barely
thrust his arm through the aperture that opened out on the
plague-stricken cabin. For the first time since the stirring beginning
of his adventures at Prince Albert a sickening sense of his own
impotency began to weigh on Howland. He was a prisoner--penned up in a
desolate room in the heart of a wilderness. And he, Jack Howland, a man
who had always taken pride in his physical prowess, had allowed one man
to place him there.

His blood began to boil as he thought of it. Now, as he had time and
silence in which to look back on what had happened, he was enraged at
the pictures that flashed one after another before him. He had allowed
himself to be used as nothing more than a pawn in a strange and
mysterious game. It was not through his efforts alone that he ha