Beresford’s body lost its easy grace instantly and became rigid.  His voice rang with sharp authority.

“Where is she?”

“She at Jasper’s cabin on Cache Creek.  She frightened.”

As though the mention of Sleeping Dawn’s name had reached him by some process of telepathy, Tom Morse had come out and stood in the door of the store.  The trooper wheeled to him.

“Get me a dog-team, Tom.  That fellow West has got Jessie McRae with him on Cache Creek.  We’ve got to move quick.”

The storekeeper felt as though the bottom had dropped out of his heart.  He glanced up at the lowering night.  “Storm brewing.  We’ll get started right away.”  Without a moment’s delay he disappeared inside the store to make his preparations.

Onistah carried the news to McRae.

The blood washed out of the ruddy-whiskered face of the Scot, but his sole comment was a Scriptural phrase of faith.  “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken...”

It was less than half an hour later that four men and a dog-train moved up the main street of Faraway and disappeared in the forest.  Morse broke trail and McRae drove the tandem.  Onistah, who had already traveled many miles, brought up the rear.  The trooper exchanged places with Morse after an hour’s travel.

They were taking a short-cut and it led them through dead and down timber that delayed the party.  Tom was a good axeman, and more than once he had to chop away obstructing logs.  At other times by main strength the men lifted or dragged the sled over bad places.

The swirling storm made it difficult to know where they were going or to choose the best way.  They floundered through deep snow and heavy underbrush, faces bleeding from the whip of willow switches suddenly released and feet so torn by the straps of the snowshoes that the trail showed stains of blood which had soaked from the moccasins.

Onistah, already weary, began to lag.  They dared not wait for him.  There was, they felt, not a moment to be lost.  McRae’s clean-shaven upper lip was a straight, grim surface.  He voiced no fears, no doubts, but the others knew from their own anxiety how much he must be suffering.

The gale increased.  It drove in bitter blasts of fine stinging sleet.  When for a few hundred yards they drew out of the thick forest into an open grove, it lashed them so furiously they could scarcely move in the teeth of it.

The dogs were whimpering at their task.  More than once they stopped, exhausted by the wind against which they were battling.  Their eyes turned dumbly to McRae for instructions.  He could only drive them back to the trail Morse was breaking.

The train was one of the best in the North.  The leader was a large St. Bernard, weighing about one hundred sixty pounds, intelligent, faithful, and full of courage.  He stood thirty-four inches high at his fore shoulder.  Not once did Cuffy falter.  Even when the others quit, he was ready to put his weight to the load.