“The devil!” he exclaimed.

“What’s that?” asked Gregson, edging around him curiously.

Howland crushed the note in his hand and thrust it into one of his pockets.

“A little private affair,” he laughed.  “Comes Gregson, let’s see what we can discover.”

In the gloom outside one of his hands slipped under his coat and rested on the butt of his revolver.  Until ten o’clock they mixed casually among the populace of Le Pas.  Half a hundred people had seen Croisset and his beautiful companion, but no one knew anything about them.  They had come that forenoon on a sledge, had eaten their dinner and supper at the cabin of a Scotch tie-cutter named MacDonald, and had left on a sledge.

“She was the sweetest thing I ever saw,” exclaimed Mrs. MacDonald rapturously.  “Only she couldn’t talk.  Two or three times she wrote things to me on a slip of paper.”

“Couldn’t talk!” repeated Gregson, as the two men walked leisurely back to the boarding-house.  “What the deuce do you suppose that means, Jack?”

“I’m not supposing,” replied Howland indifferently.  “We’ve had enough of this pretty face, Gregson.  I’m going to bed.  What time do we start in the morning?”

“As soon as we’ve had breakfast—­if you’re anxious.”

“I am.  Good night.”

Howland went to his room, but it was not to sleep.  For hours he sat wide-awake, smoking cigar after cigar, and thinking.  One by one he went over the bewildering incidents of the past two days.  At first they had stirred his blood with a certain exhilaration—­a spice of excitement which was not at all unpleasant; but with this excitement there was now a peculiar sense of oppression.  The attempt that had already been made on his life together with the persistent warnings for him to return into the South began to have their effect.  But Howland was not a man to surrender to his fears, if they could be called fears.  He was satisfied that a mysterious peril of some kind awaited him at the camp on the Wekusko, but he gave up trying to fathom the reason for this peril, accepting in his businesslike way the fact that it did exist, and that in a short time it would probably explain itself.  The one puzzling factor which he could not drive out of his thoughts was the girl.  Her sweet face haunted him.  At every turn he saw it—­now over the table in the opium den, now in the white starlight of the trail, again as it had looked at him for an instant from the sledge.  Vainly he strove to discover for himself the lurking of sin in the pure eyes that had seemed to plead for his friendship, in the soft lips that had lied to him because of their silence.  “Please forgive me for what I have done—­” He unfolded the crumpled note and read the words again and again.  “Believe me now—­” She knew that he knew that she had lied to him, that she had lured him into the danger from which she now wished to save him.  His cheeks burned.  If a thousand