on the Saskatchewan where McDowell
commanded Division of the Royal Mounted. The thought of distance did
not appall him. Four years at the top of the earth had accustomed him
to the illimitable and had inured him to the lack of things. That
winter Conniston had followed him with the tenacity of a ferret for a
thousand miles along the rim of the Arctic, and it had been a miracle
that he had not killed the Englishman. A score of times he might have
ended the exciting chase without staining his own hands. His Eskimo
friends would have performed the deed at a word. But he had let the
Englishman live, and Conniston, dead, was sending him back home. Eight
hundred miles was but the step between.

He had no dogs or sledge. His own team had given up the ghost long ago,
and a treacherous Kogmollock from the Roes Welcome had stolen the
Englishman's outfit in the last lap of their race down from Fullerton's
Point. What he carried was Conniston's, with the exception of his rifle
and his own parka and hood. He even wore Conniston's watch. His pack
was light. The chief articles it contained were a little flour, a
three-pound tent, a sleeping-bag, and certain articles of
identification to prove the death of John Keith, the outlaw. Hour after
hour of that first day the zip, zip, zip of his snowshoes beat with
deadly monotony upon his brain. He could not think. Time and again it
seemed to him that something was pulling him back, and always he was
hearing Conniston's voice and seeing Conniston's face in the gray gloom
of the day about him. He passed through the slim finger of scrub timber
that a strange freak of nature had flung across the plain, and once
more was a moving speck in a wide and wind-swept barren. In the
afternoon he made out a dark rim on the southern horizon and knew it
was timber, real timber, the first he had seen since that day, a year
and a half ago, when the last of the Mackenzie River forest had faded
away behind him! It gave him, at last, something tangible to grip. It
was a thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was
his other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the
space between himself and that growing, black rim on the horizon.

He reached it as the twilight of the day was dissolving into the deeper
dusk of the night, and put up his tent in the shelter of a clump of
gnarled and storm-beaten spruce. Then he gathered wood and built
himself a fire. He did not count the sticks