“Would you mind spreading a blanket on the floor, M’seur?  If you are gone long this box will grow hard and sharp.”

A few minutes later, after he had made his prisoner as comfortable as possible in the cabin, Howland went again through the fringe of scrub bush to the edge of the ridge.  Below him the plain was lost in the gloom of night.  He could see nothing of the buildings at the post but two or three lights gleaming faintly through the darkness.  Overhead there were no stars; thickening snow shut out what illumination there might have been in the north, and even as he stood looking into the desolation to the west the snow fell faster and the lights grew fainter and fainter until all was a chaos of blackness.

In these moments a desire that was almost madness swept over him.  Since his fight with Jean the swift passing of events had confined his thoughts to their one objective—­the finding of Meleese and her people.  He had assured himself that his every move was to be a cool and calculating one, that nothing—­not even his great love—­should urge him beyond that reason which had made him a master-builder among men.  As he stood with the snow falling heavily on him he knew that his trail would be covered before another day—­that for an indefinite period he might safely wait and watch for Meleese on the mountain top.  And yet, slowly, he made his way down the side of the ridge.  A little way out there in the gloom, barely beyond the call of his voice, was the girl for whom he was willing to sacrifice all that he had ever achieved in life.  With each step the desire in him grew—­the impulse to bring himself nearer to her, to steal across the plain, to approach in the silent smother of the storm until he could look on the light which Jean Croisset had told him would gleam from her window.

He descended to the foot of the ridge and headed into the plain, taking the caution to bury his feet deep in the snow that he might have a trail to guide him back to the cabin.  At first he found himself impeded by low bush.  Then the plain became more open, and he knew that there was nothing but the night and the snow to shut out his vision ahead.  Still he had no motive, no reason for what he did.  The snow would cover his tracks before morning.  There would be no harm done, and he might get a glimpse of the light, of her light.

It came on his vision with a suddenness that set his heart leaping.  A dog barked ahead of him, so near that he stopped in his tracks, and then suddenly there shot through the snow-gloom the bright gleam of a lamp.  Before he had taken another breath he was aware of what had happened.  A curtain had been drawn aside in the chaos ahead.  He was almost on the walls of the post—­and the light gleamed from high, up, from the head of the stair!