For a long time the two listened, but the old man made no sound or movement.

“Better go back to bed,” said Wabi.  “I thought if he was going to keep it up you would like to hear.  I’ll call you at two.”

But Rod could not sleep.  For a long time he lay awake thinking of John Ball and his, strange ravings.  Who was Dolores?  What terrible tragedy had that black world under the mountains some time beheld?  Despite his better reason an indefinable sensation of uneasiness possessed him as the madman’s sobbing out of the woman’s name recurred to him.  He spoke nothing of this to Wabi when he relieved him, and he said nothing of it during the days that followed.  They were days of unending toil, of fierce effort to beat out death in the race to Wabinosh House.

For it seemed that the end of time was very near for John Ball.  On the fourth day his thin cheeks showed signs of fever, and on the fifth he was tossing in delirium.  The race now continued by night as well as by day, only an hour or two of rest being snatched at a time.  During these days John Ball babbled ceaselessly of Dolores, and great beasts, and the endless cavern; and now the beasts began taking the form of strange people whose eyes gleamed from out of masses of fur, and who had hands, and flung spears.  On the eighth day the madman sank back into his old lethargy.  On the fourth day after that the three adventurers, worn and exhausted, reached the shore of Lake Nipigon.  Thirty miles across the lake was Wabinosh House, and it was decided that Mukoki and Rod should leave for assistance, while Wabigoon remained with John Ball.  The two rolled themselves in their blankets immediately after supper, and after three hours’ sleep were awakened by the young Indian.  All that night they paddled with only occasional moments of rest.  The sun was just rising over the forests when they grounded their canoe close to the Post.  As Rod sprang ashore he saw a figure walk slowly out from the edge of the forest an eighth of a mile away.  Even at that distance he recognized Minnetaki!  He looked at the sharp-eyed Mukoki.  He, too, had seen and recognized the girl.

“Muky, I’m going along in the edge of the woods and give her a surprise,” said Rod courageously.  “Will you wait here?”

Mukoki grinned a nodding assent, and the youth darted into the edge of the forest.  He was breathless when he came up a hundred yards behind the girl, screened from view by the trees.  Softly he whistled.  It was a signal that Minnetaki had taught him on his first trip into the North, and he knew of only two who used it in all that Northland, and those two were the Indian maiden and himself.  The girl turned as she heard the trilling note, and Rod drew himself farther back.  He whistled again, more loudly than before, and Minnetaki came hesitatingly toward the forest’s edge, and when he whistled a third time there came a timid response from her, as if she recognized and yet doubted the notes that floated to her from the shadows of the balsams.