“Waited for him when he was almost helpless and the man meant to murder him?” said Seaforth, with cold rage and horror in his face.

Okanagan laughed a little almost silent laugh that had a very grim undertone in it.  “Yes, sir.  That’s just what he did.  Don’t you know Harry yet?” he said.  “Still, he didn’t figure that all the killing would be done by the other man.  See here, this is where he gripped him, and tried to get the knife in.  They fell over together there.  Harry was played out and bleeding hard, or that man would never have got away when he once had his hands on him.”

Seaforth stared at the rent-down undergrowth, and had no great difficulty in reconstructing the scene.  Smashed fern and scattered leaves as well as the red smears on the snow bore plain testimony to the fierceness of that struggle, and he pictured his comrade grappling with his adversary while his strength flowed from him with that horrible red trickle.  The light that came down between towering trunks showed that his face was grey and stern, and Okanagan, who looked at him, nodded as it were approvingly.

“I’ve seen enough,” said the former.  “If I can find that man he will not get away from me.”

“Well,” said Okanagan simply, “we’re short of the bullet now, and I’ll know better what to do with Harry when we find it.  It’s low down in one of those cedars yonder.”

“It will be deep in at that range,” said Seaforth.

“No,” said Okanagan quietly.  “I don’t think it will.  It’s pretty plain from the hole it made that it wasn’t a common bullet, and I’m kind of anxious to know if all of it came out again.”

Seaforth shivered a little as he assisted in the search, and his lips were set when Okanagan, digging something out of the cedar-bark with his knife, laid it in his palm.  It was a little piece of blackened lead that was ragged in place of round, as though the soft metal had been rent open and bent backwards.  Then the two men looked at each other, and the hot fury that for a moment flushed Seaforth to the temples, passed and left him with a curious vindictive coldness and a faint shrinking from the touch of the murderous lead.  Okanagan’s eyes were very steady, but there was a little glow down at the back of them.

“Nicked across with a hack saw or a file—­and it’s not all here,” he said.  “It strikes me the sooner we find the rest of it the better this weather.”

Seaforth drew in his breath.  A strip of lead torn off that bullet was rankling in his comrade’s flesh, and during the night bitter frost had laid its grip upon the forest.  Wounds, he knew, do not heal, but fester under such conditions.

“You can do it, Tom!” he said, and his voice was hoarse.

“I’ll try—­when he wakes,” said Okanagan.  “You’ll find some flat stones by the river.  I want one with an open grit that you could grind a knife down with.”