THE MAN-HUNTERS READ SIGN

In the white North travelers are few and far.  It is impossible for one to pass through the country without leaving a record of his progress written on the terrain and in the minds of the natives.  The fugitive did not attempt concealment.  He had with him now an Indian guide and was pushing into the Barren Lands.  There was no uncertainty about his movements.  From Fort Chippewayan he had swung to the northwest in the line of the great frozen lakes, skirting Athabasca and following the Great Slave River to the lake of the same name.  This he crossed at the narrowest point, about where the river empties into it, and headed for the eastern extremity of Lake La Martre.

On his heels, still far behind, trod the two pursuers, patient, dogged, and inexorable.  They had left far in the rear the out-forts of the Mounted and the little settlements of the free traders.  Already they were deep in the Hudson’s Bay Company trapping-grounds.  Ahead of them lay the Barrens, stretching to the inlets of the Arctic Ocean.

The days were drawing out and the nights getting shorter.  The untempered sun of the Northland beat down on the cold snow crystals and reflected a million sparks of light.  In that white field the glare was almost unbearable.  Both of them wore smoked glasses, but even with these their eyes continually smarted.  They grew red and swollen.  If time had not been so great an element in their journey, they would have tried to travel only after sunset.  But they could not afford this.  West would keep going as long and as fast as he could.

Each of them dreaded snow-blindness.  They knew the sign of it—­a dreadful pain, a smarting of the eyeballs as though hot burning sand were being flung against them.  In camp at night they bathed their swollen lids and applied a cool and healing salve.

Meanwhile the weeks slipped into months and still they held like bulldogs to the trail of the man they were after.

The silence of the wide, empty white wastes surrounded them, except for an occasional word, the whine of a dog, and the slithering crunch of the sled-runners.  From unfriendly frozen deserts they passed, through eternal stillness, into the snow wilderness that seemed to stretch forever.  When they came to forests, now thinner, smaller, and less frequent, they welcomed them as they would an old friend.

“He’s headin’ for Great Bear, looks like,” Morse suggested one morning after an hour in which neither of them had spoken.

“I was wondering when you’d chirp up, Tom,” Beresford grinned cheerfully.  “Sometimes I think I’m fed up for life on the hissing of snowshoe runners.  The human voice sure sounds good up here.  Yes, Great Bear Lake.  And after that, where?”

“Up the lake, across to the Mackenzie, and down it to the ocean, I’d say.  He’s makin’ for the whaling waters.  Herschel Island maybe.  He’s hoping to bump into a whaler and get down on it to ’Frisco.”