l spark. They endured fearful cramps. So far had their faculties
lost vigour that only by a distinct effort of the will could they focus
their eyes to the examination of any object.

Their obsessions of mind were now two. They followed the Trail; they
looked for the caribou herds. After a time the improbability became
tenuous. They actually expected the impossible, felt defrauded at not
obtaining it, cried out weakly against their ill fortune in not
encountering the herd that was probably two thousand miles away. In its
withholding the North seemed to play unfairly. She denied them the
chances of the game.

And the Trail! Not the freezing nor the starvation nor the illusion were
so potent in the deeper discouragement of the spirit as that. Always it
led on. They could see it; they could see its direction; that was all.
Tireless it ran on and on and on. For all they knew the Indian, hearty
and confident in his wilderness strength, might be watching them at
every moment, laughing at the feeble thirty feet their pain bought them,
gliding on swiftly in an hour farther than they could travel in a day.
This possibility persisted until, in their minds, it became the fact.
They endowed their enemy with all they themselves lacked; with strength,
with swiftness, with the sustenance of life. Yet never for a moment did
it occur to them to abandon the pursuit.

Sam was growing uncertain in his movements; Dick was plainly going mad.
The girl followed; that was all one could say, for whatever suffering
she proved was hidden beneath race stolidity, and more nobly beneath a
great devotion.

And then late one afternoon they came to a bloody spot on the snow. Here
Jingoss had killed. Here he had found what had been denied them, what
they needed so sorely. The North was on his side. He now had meat in
plenty, and meat meant strength, and strength meant swiftness, and
swiftness meant the safety of this world for him and the certainty of
the next for them. The tenuous hope that had persisted through all the
psychological pressure the North had brought to bear, the hope that they
had not even acknowledged to themselves, the hope based merely on the
circumstance that they did not _know_, was routed by this one fact. Now
they could no longer shelter behind the flimsy screen of an ignorance of
their enemy's condition. They knew. The most profound discouragement
descended on them.

But even yet they did not yield to the great antagonist. The