“How far do you think we have come?”

Mukoki had gone a few steps ahead, and before Wabi answered he called softly to them from close up against the chasm wall.  They hurried to him and found him standing beside the rift.

“Here!”

Wabi handed his rifle to Rod.

“I’m going up first,” he announced.  “If the coast is clear I’ll whistle down.”

For a few moments Mukoki and Rod could hear him as he crawled up the fissure.  Then all was silent.  A quarter of an hour passed, and a low whistle came to their ears.  Another ten minutes and the three stood together at the top of the mountain, Rod and the wounded Mukoki breathing hard from their exertions.

For a time the three sat down in the snow and waited, watched, listened; and from Rod’s heart there went up something that was almost a prayer, for it was snowing—­snowing hard, and it seemed to him that the storm was something which God had specially directed should fall in their path that it might shield them and bring them safely home.

And when he rose to his feet Wabi was still silent, and the three gripped hands in mute thankfulness at their deliverance.

Still speechless, they turned instinctively for a moment back to the dark desolation beyond the chasm—­the great, white wilderness in which they had passed so many adventurous yet happy weeks; and as they gazed into the chaos beyond the second mountain there came to them the lonely, wailing howl of a wolf.

“I wonder,” said Wabi softly.  “I wonder—­if that—­is Wolf?”

And then, Indian file, they trailed into the south.

CHAPTER XVI

THE SURPRISE AT THE POST

From the moment that the adventurers turned their backs upon the Woonga country Mukoki was in command.  With the storm in their favor everything else now depended upon the craft of the old pathfinder.  There was neither moon nor wind to guide them, and even Wabi felt that he was not competent to strike a straight trail in a strange country and a night storm.  But Mukoki, still a savage in the ways of the wilderness, seemed possessed of that mysterious sixth sense which is known as the sense of orientation—­that almost supernatural instinct which guides the carrier pigeon as straight as a die to its home-cote hundreds of miles away.  Again and again during that thrilling night’s flight Wabi or Rod would ask the Indian where Wabinosh House lay, and he would point out its direction to them without hesitation.  And each time it seemed to the city youth that he pointed a different way, and it proved to him how easy it was to become hopelessly lost in the wilderness.

Not until midnight did they pause to rest.  They had traveled slowly but steadily and Wabi figured that they had covered fifteen miles.  Five miles behind them their trail was completely obliterated by the falling snow.  Morning would betray to the Woongas no sign of the direction taken by the fugitives.