Wabi leaned forward with more than usual eagerness.

“I have had a thought—­” he began.

“What?”

“That perhaps he was not killed.”

“And that after the two Frenchmen died in the knife duel he returned and got the gold,” continued Rod.

“No, I had not thought of that,” said Wabi.  Suddenly he rose to his feet and joined Mukoki out in the gloom of the chasm.

Rod was puzzled.  Something in his companion’s voice, in his face and words, disturbed him.  What had Wabigoon meant?

The young Indian soon rejoined him, but he spoke no more of John Ball.

When the two boys went to their blankets Mukoki still remained awake.  For a long time he sat beside the fire, his hands gripping the rifle across his knees, his head slightly bowed in that statue-like posture so characteristic of the Indian.  For fully an hour he sat motionless, and in his own way he was deeply absorbed in thought.  Soon after their discovery of the first golden bullet Wabigoon had whispered a few words into his ear, unknown to Rod; and to-night out in the gloom of the chasm, he had repeated those same words.  They had set Mukoki’s mind working.  He was thinking now of something that happened long ago, when, in his reasoning, the wilderness was young and he was a youth.  In those days his one great treasure was a dog, and one winter he went with this faithful companion far into the hunting regions of the North, a long moon’s travel from his village.  When he returned, months later, he was alone.  From his lonely hunting shack deep in the solitudes his comrade had disappeared, and had never returned.  This all happened before Mukoki met the pretty Indian girl who became his wife, and was afterward killed by the wolves, and he missed the dog as he would have missed a human brother.  The Indian’s love, even for brutes, is some thing that lives, and more than twenty moons later—­two years in the life of a man—­he returned once again to the old shack, and there he found Wholdaia, the dog!  The animal knew him, and bounded about on three legs for joy, and because of the missing leg Mukoki understood why he had not returned to him two years before.  Two years is a long time in the life of a dog, and the gray hairs of suffering and age were freely sprinkled in Wholdaia’s muzzle and along his spine.

Mukoki was not thinking of Wholdaia without a reason.  He was thinking of Wabigoon’s words—­and the mad hunter.  Could not the mad hunter do as Wholdaia had done?  Was it possible that the bad-dog man who shot golden bullets and who screamed like a lynx was the man who had lived there many, many years ago, and whom the boys called John Ball?  Those were the thoughts that Wabi had set working in his brain.  The young Indian had not suggested this to Rod.  He had spoken of it to Mukoki only because he knew the old pathfinder might help him to solve the riddle, and so he had started Mukoki upon the trail.