"He's got crazy, looking at de track," said Big Baptiste, "for that's
the way,--one is enchanted,--he must follow."

"He was a good boss," said Jawnny, sadly.

As the young fellow disappeared in the alders the men looked at one
another with a certain shame. Not a sound except the sough of pines
from the neighboring forest was heard. Though the sun was sinking in
clear blue, the aspect of the wilderness, gray and white and severe,
touched the impressionable men with deeper melancholy. They felt
lonely, masterless, mean.

"He was a good boss," said Jawnny again.

"_Tort Dieu!_" cried Baptiste, leaping to his feet. "It's a shame to
desert the young boss. I don't care; the Windego can only kill me. I'm
going to help Mr. Tom."

"Me also," said Jawnny.

Then all wished to go. But after some parley it was agreed that the
others should wait for the portageurs, who were likely to be two miles
behind, and make camp for the night.

Soon Baptiste and Jawnny, each with his axe, started diagonally across
the swale, and entered the alders on Tom's track.

It took them twenty yards through the alders, to the edge of a warm
spring or marsh about fifty yards wide. This open, shallow water was
completely encircled by alders that came down to its very edge. Tom's
snow-shoe track joined the track of the mysterious monster for the
first time on the edge--and there both vanished!

Baptiste and Jawnny looked at the place with the wildest terror, and
without even thinking to search the deeply indented opposite edges of
the little pool for a reappearance of the tracks, fled back to the
party. It was just as Red Dick Humphreys had said; just as they had
always heard. Tom, like Hermidas Dubois, appeared to have vanished
from existence the moment he stepped on the Windego track!

* * * * *

The dimness of early evening was in the red-pine forest through which
Tom's party had passed early in the afternoon, and the belated
portageurs were tramping along the line. A man with a red head had
been long crouching in some cedar bushes to the east of the "blazed"
cutting. When he had watched the portageurs pass out of sight, he
stepped over upon their track, and followed it a short distance.

A few minutes later a young fellow, over six feet high, who strongly
resembled Tom Dunscombe, followed the red-headed man.

The stranger, suddenly catching sight of a flame far away ahead on the
edge of the beaver meadow,