How those three words, falling clearly from the girl’s lips, thrilled the hearts of Mukoki and the young adventurers.  Night had closed in, and only the fitful flashes of the fire illumined the interior of the old cabin.  The four had finished eating, and as they drew themselves close about the fire there fell a strange silence among them.  The lost gold.  Rod gazed across at Wabigoon, whose bronzed face was half hid in the dancing shadows, and then at Mukoki, whose wrinkled visage shone like dull copper as he stared like some watchful animal into the flame glow.  But it was Minnetaki who sent the blood in a swift rush of joy and pride through his veins.  He caught her eyes upon him, shining like stars from out of the gloom, and he knew that she was looking at him in that way because he was her hero.

For many minutes no one broke the stillness.  The fire burned down, and with its slow dying away the gloom in the corners of the old cabin thickened, and the faces became more and more like ghostly shadows, until they reminded Rod of his first vision of the ancient skeletons in that other old cabin many miles away.  Then came Wabigoon’s voice, as he stirred the coals and added fresh fuel.

“Yes, it was Rod.  This is the map he found, Minnetaki.”

He kneeled close beside his sister and drew forth his copy of the precious secret which the skeletons had guarded.  With a little cry of excitement the girl took the map in her hands, and step by step, adventure by adventure, was gone over the thrilling story of the Wolf Hunters, until the late hours of night had changed into the first of morning.  Twice did Minnetaki insist on having repeated to her the story of Rod’s wild adventure in the mysterious chasm, and when he came to the terrors of that black night and its strange sounds Rod felt a timid little hand come close to him, and as Wabigoon continued the narration, and told of the map in the skeleton hand, and of the tale of murder and tragedy it revealed, Minnetaki’s breath came in quick, tense eagerness.

“And you are going back in the spring?” she asked.

“In the spring,” replied Rod.

Again Wabigoon urged Rod, as he had done at the Post, to send down to civilization for his mother instead of going for her himself.  Time would be saved, he argued.  They could set out on their search for the gold within a few weeks.  But Rod was firm.

“It would not be fair to mother,” he declared.  “I must go home first, even if I have to arrange for a special sledge at Kenegami House to take me down to civilization.”

But even while he was stoutly declaring what it was his intention to do, fate was stealthily at work weaving another of her webs of destiny for Roderick Drew, and his friends’ anxious eyes saw the first signs of it when they bade him good night.  For fever had laid its hand on the white youth, the fever that foreshadows death unless a surgeon is near, the fever of a wound going bad.  Even Mukoki, graduated by Nature, taught by half a century’s battle with life in this great desolation of the North, knew that his own powers were now of no avail.