thing in the mighty wind, he was scarcely able to tell
his right from his left, and, had it not been for Michael's zeal
in giving the alarm, this story might have ended here.

With the sound of the bell to give him direction, McTavish bore
off to the left. There, the snow had been drifted high against the
wall. More than that, the path that ran along the latter had
contributed materially to the height of the bank, and McTavish
counted on this means of scaling the fifteen-foot obstruction...
Would he ever find the place?

At last, he felt the ascent under his feet, and struggled up. With
a thankfulness that he had never before experienced, he found but
three feet of wall confronting him at the top, and swung his feet
over quickly. What fortune awaited him on the long drop to earth,
he did not know. He remembered the spot in summer as a grassy mound,
with a few small rocks showing here and there. With fatalistic
indifference, he pushed himself off, and, after a breathless second,
struck the hard snow crust, and went through it with a crash,
snowshoes and all, sinking to his ankles. It took but a moment to
extricate himself, and he now turned his back to the wind, which
was theoretically from the north--"theoretically," because in a
genuine blizzard the wind has been known to blow upon the bewildered
traveler from four directions inside a minute. Everywhere one turns,
he is met by a breath-taking blast.

The old Beaver Trail started south of the fort, alongside the little
hillock where Jean had been tobogganing the day of her disappearance,
and thence ran for miles, crossing the little streams and ponds
where the beaver villages had been built. Because most of the beaver
colonies had been broken up along this route, the trail had been
superseded by another, called the New Trail; hence this was an
unfrequented, almost untraveled, path that Peter Rainy had named.

Donald McTavish knew every shrub, tree, and stone within a mile of
Fort Severn in any direction, after the summer spent there, and
to-night he relied upon his recognition of inanimate objects to
lead him aright. A ghostly spruce with a wedge-shaped bite out of
its stiff foliage told him he was a hundred feet to the right; a
flat-topped rock, suddenly stumbled upon, convinced him that for
five minutes he had been walking back toward the fort.

The alarm-bell had ceased ringing now, and he could hear nothing
but the shriek of the wind, the hollow roaring of it