“He went North about the time we started.”  Barney danced over the floor in his excitement.

While the boys were too excited to do further deciphering, the Major’s cooler brain was busy.  Soon he rose and began pacing rapidly back and forth across the room.  His face wore anything but a pleased expression, and his limp was greatly increased by his irritation.

“Did you get it?” asked Barney.

“I should say I did!” exclaimed the Major.  “Right in the neck!  And to think,” he sputtered, “here we are without gasoline to carry us a hundred miles, and he starting with everything in his favor.  If we just had gas for three hundred miles.  There’s plenty on the schooner, Gussie Brown.  I called Nome yesterday and found that out.  But they can’t bring it to us, and we can’t go to them.  We’re stuck; stuck right here!  And he’s starting to-morrow!”

The boys stared in speechless amazement, as the Major, dropping into a chair, covered his face with his hands.

It was many minutes before he was calm enough to tell them the simple truth of the matter, which was, of course, that the wireless message was that one sent by the Doctor on the Aleutian Islands, telling of his intended journey Northward; also that this same doctor was a hated rival explorer, whom he had beaten a few years before; that he had not intended going North at this time, but this action of his rival made it imperative that he do so now.  Finally, that the trading gasoline schooner, Gussie Brown, was frozen in the ice three hundred miles north of Conjurer’s Bay and Great Bear Lake, and had an ample supply of gasoline.

“But after all, I guess we’re beaten,” said the Major wearily.  “If we succeed in getting out of this scrape alive we’ll be fortunate.”

“Cheer up!  The worst is yet to come,” smiled Barney.  “Let’s turn in.”

Two interesting problems awaited the party in the morning.  Was the man who had been accidentally shot the night before the anarchist trader?  If so, who was the person whose bones lay in the ruins?  Was the infernal-machine a genuine affair, and if so, would it explode?  While the Major was still brooding over his disappointment, the boys were so eager for these investigations that they quite forgot the affair of the wireless message.

The identity of the dead man was soon established by papers found in his pockets.  He was the trader.  The skull found in the ruins was unmistakably that of an Indian.  A break in this skull showed that the person had died a violent death and had not been caught by the fire.  The conclusion the boys arrived at was that the trader had killed the Indian and had fled to the woods.  The Indians in revenge had burned his trading station.  That he had intended to destroy the explorers was beyond question.  He had, therefore, met a well-deserved fate.  His body was buried, Eskimo-style, on top of the ground, with stones piled over it to protect it from wolves.