ast a shadowy object loomed in front of them.
As they came up, Benson pointed to a slight depression.

"We can follow it if it gets no fainter; but there's no time to lose,"
he said. "It might be safer if I went first and kept my eye on the
trail."

He shuffled forward with lowered head, while Blake came behind, helping
Harding as best he could. All three long remembered the next
half-hour. Once they lost the trail and were seized with despair, but,
searching anxiously, they found it again.

At last a pale, elusive light appeared amid the snow ahead, and they
watched it with keen satisfaction as it grew clearer. When it had
changed to a strong yellow glow, they passed a broken white barrier
which Blake supposed was a ruined stockade, and the hazy mass of a
building showed against the snow. Then there was a loud barking of
dogs, and while they sought for the door a stream of light suddenly
shone out, with a man's dark figure in the midst of it.

The next minute they entered the house, and Harding, lurching forward
across the floor of a large room, clutched at a table and then fell
with a crash into a chair. After the extreme cold outside, the air was
suffocatingly hot. Overcome by the change and pain, Harding leaned
back with flushed face and half-closed eyes, while his companions stood
still, with the snow glistening on their ragged furs.

The man shut the door before he turned to them.

"A rough night," he said calmly. "Ye might as weel sit down. Where do
ye hail from?"

Blake laughed as he found a seat. He imagined that their appearance
must have been somewhat startling, but he knew it takes a good deal to
disturb the equanimity of a Hudson Bay Scot.

"From Sweetwater; but we have been up in the timber belt since winter
set in. Now we have run out of provisions and my partner's lamed by
snowshoe trouble."

"Ay," said the man; "I suspected something o' the kind. But maybe
ye'll be wanting supper?"

"I believe, if we were put to it, we could eat half a caribou," Benson
told him with a grin.

"It's no to be had," the Scot answered in a matter-of-fact tone. "I
can give ye a good thick bannock and some whitefish. Our stores are no
so plentiful the now."

They took off their furs and glanced about the place while their host
was busy at the stove. The room was large, and its walls of narrow
logs were chinked with clay and moss. Guns and steel traps hung upon
them; the floor was made of uneven