The dog train was moving at a reckless gait over the untracked, hardening snow.  The man Gouter was driving under imperative orders such as he loved.  Bull Sternford had told him when he left the shelter of No. 10 Camp:  “Get there!  Get there quick!  There’s dogs and to spare at all our camps, and I don’t care a curse if you run the outfit to death.”

To a man of Gouter’s breed the order was sufficient.  Half Eskimo, half white man, he was a savage of the wild, born and bred to the fierce northern trail, one of Labrador’s hereditary fur hunters by sea and land.  Speed on the fiercest trail was the dream of his vanity.  Relays of dogs, such as he could never afford, and something accomplished which he could tell of over the camp fire to his less fortunate brethren.  So he accepted the white man’s order and drove accordingly.

Bull Sternford sat huddled in the back of the sled under the fur robes which alone made life possible.  His work at No. 10 Camp had left him satisfied, but every nerve in his body was alert for the final coup he contemplated.  He was weary in mind as well as body.  And in his heart he knew that the need of his physical resources was not so very far off.  But he was beyond care.  He had said he was crazy for sleep, but the words gave no indication of his real condition.  His eyes ached.  His head throbbed.  There were moments, even, when the things he beheld, the things he thought became distorted.  But he knew that somewhere ahead a ghostly outfit of strangers was pursuing its evil work against him, and he meant to come up with it, and to wreak his vengeance in merciless, summary fashion.  His purpose had become an obsession in the long sleepless days and nights he had endured.

It was war.  It was bitter ruthless war on the barren hinterland of Labrador, where civilisation was unknown.  Mercy?  Nature never designed that terrible wilderness as a setting for mercy.

The dogs had been running for hours when Gouter’s voice came sharply back over his shoulder.

“Dog!” he cried, in the laconic fashion habitual to him.

Bull knelt up.  His movement suggested the nervous strain he was enduring.  It was almost electrical.

“Where?” he demanded, peering out into the shining night over the man’s furry shoulder.

The half-breed raised a pointing whip ahead and to the south.

“Sure,” he said.  “I hear him.”

Bull had heard nothing.  Nothing but the hiss of the snow under their own runners, and the whimper of their own dogs.

“It wouldn’t be a wolf or fox?” he demurred.

The half-breed clucked his tongue.  His vanity was outraged.

Bull gazed intently in the direction the whip had pointed.  He could see only the far-off forest line, and the soft whiteness of the world of snow.

“Hark!”

The half-breed again held up his whip.  This time it was for attention.  Bull listened.  Still he could hear nothing, nothing at all but the sounds of their own progress.