, feeling
his way like a cat, he advanced toward the prostrate figure. Despite his
caution, the crust of the snow crackled once beneath his touch, and he
paused, a soundless curse forming upon his lips; but the warning passed
unheeded, and, bolder than before, he padded on.

Eight feet he gained, then ten. His color heightened, the repressed
arteries throbbed above the gaudy neckerchief, the skulking animal
intensified in the tightened muscles of the temples. As many feet again;
but a few more minutes--then liberty and life. The better to guard his
movements, his gaze fell. Out and down went his right hand, then his
left, as his lithe body slid forward. Again he glanced up, paused--and
on the instant every muscle of his tense body went suddenly lax. Instead
of the closed eyes and sleeping face he had expected, two steady eyes
were giving him back look for look. There had not been a motion; the
face was yet that of a sleeper; the chest still rose and fell steadily;
but the eyes!

Tom Blair's teeth ground each other like those of a dog with rabies. The
suggestion of froth came to his lips.

"Curse you!" he cried. "Curse you forever!"

A moment they lay so, a moment wherein the last vestige of hope left the
mind of the captive; but in it Ben Blair spoke no word. Maddening,
immeasurably worse than denunciation, was that relentless silence. It
was uncanny; and the bearded man felt the hairs of his head rising as
the mane of a dog or a wolf lifts at a sound it does not understand.

"Say something," he pleaded desperately. "Shoot me, kill me, do
anything--but don't look at me like that!" and, fairly writhing, he
crawled back to his blanket and buried his head in its depths.

With the coming of evening coolness, Ben again made preparation for the
journey. Neither of the men made reference to the incidents of the day,
but on Tom Blair's face there was a new expression, like that of a
criminal on his passage from the cell to the hangman's trap. If the
younger man saw it, he gave no sign; and as on the night before, they
jogged ahead. Before daylight broke, the comparatively smooth bed of Bad
River merged into the irregular surface of the Missouri. Then they
halted. Why they stopped there, Tom Blair could not at the time tell;
but with the coming of daylight he understood. Where he had crossed and
Ben had followed there was not now a single track, but many--a score at
least. At the margin of the stream, where the cavalcade h