. She did not
bother to repair it. Carrying it beneath her arm, she hobbled
brokenly toward the shelter of the buildings.

Her failure at the other cabins, the lack, thus far, of all signs of
the fugitive, the vastness of the hunting-ground magnified by the
loneliness of winter, had convinced her finally that her quest was
futile. It was all a venture of madness. The idea that a woman,
alone and single-handed, with no weapon but a revolver, could track
down and subdue a desperate murderer in winter mountains where
hardly a wild thing stirred, and make him return with her to the
certain penalty--this proved how much mental mischief had again been
caused by the lure of money. The glittering seduction of gold had
deranged her. She realized it now, her mind normal in an exhausted
body. So she gained the walls of the buildings and stumbled around
them, thoughtless of any possible signs of the fugitive.

The stars were out in myriads. The Milky Way was a spectacle to
recall vividly the sentiment of the Nineteenth Psalm. The
log-buildings of the clearing, every tree-trunk and bough in the
woods beyond, the distant skyline of stump and hollow, all stood out
sharply against the peculiar radiance of the snow. The night was as
still as the spaces between the planets.

Like some wild creature of those winter woods the woman clumped and
stumbled around the main shack, seeking the door.

Finding it, she stopped; the snowshoe slipped from beneath her arm;
one numb hand groped for the log door-casing in support; the other
fumbled for the revolver.

Tracks led into that cabin!

A paralysis of fright gripped Cora McBride. Something told her
intuitively that she stood face to face at last with what she had
traveled all this mountain wilderness to find. Yet with sinking
heart it also came to her that if Hap Ruggam had made these tracks
and were still within, she must face him in her exhausted condition
and at once make that tortuous return trip to civilization. There
would be no one to help her.

She realized in that moment that she was facing the primal. And she
was not primal. She was a normal woman, weakened to near-prostration
by the trek of the past twenty-four hours. Was it not better to turn
away while there was time?

She stood debating thus, the eternal silence blanketing forest-world
and clearing. But she was allowed to make no decision.

A living body sprang suddenly upon her. Before she could cry out,
she was borne