could see his eyes. They were tight closed. As
the young man watched, the other opened them, but instantly blinked them
shut again as though he had encountered the searing of a white-hot iron.
Dick Herron understood. The man had gone snow-blind.

And then, singularly enough for the first time, it was borne in on him
who this man was, what was the significance of his return. Jingoss, the
renegade Ojibway, the defaulter, the maker of the dread, mysterious
Trail that had led them so far into this grim land, Jingoss was blind,
and, imagining himself still going north, still treading mechanically
the hopeless way of his escape, had become bewildered and turned south.

Dick waited, mysteriously held to inaction, watching the useless efforts
of this other from the vantage ground of a wonderful fatalism,--as the
North had watched him. The Indian plodded doggedly on, on, on. He
entered the circle of the little camp. Dick raised his rifle and pressed
its muzzle against the man's chest.

"Stop!" he commanded, his voice croaking harsh across the stillness.

The Indian, with a sob of mingled emotion, in which, strangely enough,
relief seemed the predominant note, collapsed to the ground. The North,
insistent on the victory but indifferent to the stake, tossed carelessly
the prize at issue into the hands of her beaten antagonist.

And then, dim and ghostly, rank after rank, across the middle distance
drifted the caribou herds.

[Illustration: "Stop!" he commanded, his voice croaking harsh across
the stillness]

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was beyond the middle of summer. The day had been hot, but now the
velvet night was descending. The canoe had turned into the channel at
the head of the island on which was situated Conjuror's House. The end
of the journey was at hand.

Dick paddled in the bow. His face had regained its freshness, but not
entirely its former boyish roundness. The old air of bravado again sat
his spirit--a man's nature persists to the end, and immortal and
unquenchable youth is a gift of the gods--but in the depths of his
strange, narrow eyes was a new steadiness, a new responsibility, the
well-known, quiet, competent look invariably a characteristic of true
woodsmen. At his feet lay the dog, one red-rimmed eye cocked up at the
man who had gone down to the depths in his company.

The Indian Jingoss sat amidships, his hands bound strongly with buckskin
thongs, a man of medium size, broad face, beady eyes