e. Sometime during the night they had fled
by dog-sledge into the North.

He was tired when he returned to the hotel and it was rather with a
sense of disappointment than pleasure that he learned the work-train was
to leave for Le Pas late that night instead of the next day. After a
quiet hour's rest in his room, however, his old enthusiasm returned to
him. He found himself feverishly anxious to reach Le Pas and the big
camp on the Wekusko. Croisset's warning for him to turn back into the
South, instead of deterring him, urged him on. He was born a fighter. It
was by fighting that he had forced his way round by round up the ladder
of success. And now the fact that his life was in danger, that some
mysterious peril awaited him in the depths of the wilderness, but added
a new and thrilling fascination to the tremendous task which was ahead
of him. He wondered if this same peril had beset Gregson and Thorne, and
if it was the cause of their failure, of their anxiety to return to
civilization. He assured himself that he would know when he met them at
Le Pas. He would discover more when he became a part of the camp on the
Wekusko; that is, if the half-breed's warning held any significance at
all, and he believed that it did. Anyway, he would prepare for
developments. So he went to a gun-shop, bought a long-barreled
six-shooter and a holster, and added to it a hunting-knife like that he
had seen carried by Croisset.

It was near midnight when he boarded the work-train and dawn was just
beginning to break over the wilderness when it stopped at Etomami, from
which point he was to travel by hand-car over the sixty miles of new
road that had been constructed as far north as Le Pas. For three days
the car had been waiting for the new chief of the road, but neither
Gregson nor Thorne was with it.

"Mr. Gregson is waiting for you at Le Pas," said one of the men who had
come with it. "Thorne is at Wekusko."

For the first time in his life Howland now plunged into the heart of the
wilderness, and as mile after mile slipped behind them and he sped
deeper into the peopleless desolation of ice and snow and forest his
blood leaped in swift excitement, in the new joy of life which he was
finding up here under the far northern skies. Seated on the front of the
car, with the four men pumping behind him, he drank in the wild beauties
of the forests and swamps through which they slipped, his eyes
constantly on the alert for signs of the bi