If mental distress and physical discomfort can constitute vengeance Ben was already avenged.  Now that they were in the hill-lands, out from the gorge and into a region of yellow beaver meadows lying between gently sloping hills, their apprehension turned to veritable terror.  A blind man could see how small was their fighting chance against a hidden foe who had prepared for their coming.  The skin twitched and crept when a twig cracked about their camp at night, and a cold like death crept over the frame when the thickets crashed under a leaping moose.

Ray found himself regretting, for the first time, that murderous crime of his of months before.  Even riches might not pay for these days of dread and nights of terror:  the recovery of the girl from Ben’s arms could not begin to recompense.  Indeed, the girl’s memory was increasingly hard to call up.  The mind was kept busy elsewhere.

“We’re walking right into a death trap,” he told Neilson one morning.  “If he is here, what chance have we got; he’d have weeks to explore the country and lay an ambush for us.  Besides, I believe he’s dead.  I don’t believe a human being could have got down this far, alive.”

Chan too had found himself inclining toward this latter belief; without Ray’s energy and ambition he had less to keep him fronted to the chase.  Neilson, however, was not yet ready to turn back.  He too feared Ben’s attack, but already in the twilight of advancing years, he did not regard physical danger in the same light as these two younger men.  Besides, he was made of different stuff.  The safety of his daughter was the one remaining impulse in his life.

And more and more, in the chill August nights, the talk about the camp fire took this trend:  the folly of pushing on.  It was better to turn back and wait his chances to strike again, Ray argued, than to walk bald-faced into death.  Sometime Ben must return to the claim:  a chance might come to lay him low.  Besides, ever it seemed more probable that the river had claimed him.

One rainy, disagreeable morning, as they camped beside the river near the mouth of a small creek, affairs reached their crisis.  They had caught and saddled the horses; Ray was pulling tight the last hitch.  Chan stood beside him, speaking in an undertone.  When he had finished Ray cursed explosively in the silence.

Neilson turned.  He seemed to sense impending developments.  “What now?” he asked.

“I’m not going on, that’s what it is,” Ray replied.  “Neilson, it’s two against one—­if you want to go on you can—­but Ray and I are going back.  That devil’s dead.  Beatrice is, too—­sure as hell.  If they ain’t dead, he’ll get us.  I was a fool ever to start out.  And that’s final.”

“You’re going back, eh—­scared out!” Neilson commented coldly.

“I’m going back—­and don’t say too much about being scared out, either.”

“And you too, Chan?  You’re against me, too?”