“Man!  Him speak with dog.  Oh, yes.”

Gouter had turned.  His beady black eyes were shining with a smile of triumph into the white man’s face.

“By the forest?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then in God’s name swing over and run to head them off!”

Gouter obeyed with alacrity.  He had impressed his white chief.  It was good.  A series of unintelligible ejaculations and the dogs swung away to the south.  Then the whip rolled out and fell with cruel accuracy.  The rawhide tugs strained under a mighty effort, as the great dogs were set racing with their lean bellies low to the ground.

Bull wiped the icicles from about his mouth and nose.

“Now have your guns ready,” he cried.  “The driver of that team is your man.  The other’s mine.  If he shows fight kill him.  There’s five hundred dollars for you if you get ’em.”

“I get ’em.”

The half-breed’s confidence was supreme.  Bull dropped back into the sled.  He sat with a pair of automatic pistols ready to his hand and gazed out over the sled rail.

It was a terrific race and all feeling of weariness had passed under the excitement of it.  The dogs were silent now.  Every nerve in their muscular bodies were straining.  The pace seemed to increase with every passing moment, and up out of the horizon the dark line of the forest leapt at them, deepening and broadening as it came.

For some time the less practised white man saw and heard nothing of his enemies.  He was forced to rely on the half-breed.  He observed the man closely.  He noted his every sign and read it as best he could.  Presently Gouter leant forward peering.  Then he straightened up and his voice came back triumphantly.

“I see dem,” he exclaimed.  And pointed almost abreast.  “Dogs.  One—­two—­five.  Yes.  Two man.  Now we get him sure.”

Down fell the whip on the racing dogs.  The man shouted his jargon at them.  The sled lurched and swayed with the added spurt, and Bull held fast to the rail.  A glad thrill surged through his senses.

It was a moment of tremendous uplift.  Bull had yearned for it for weeks.  But the short days and long nights of deferred hope had had their effect.  He had almost come to feel that this thing that was now at hand was something impossible.

Yes.  There was the outfit growing plainer and plainer with every moment.  He could see it clearly.  He could even count its details as the other’s sharper eyes had counted them minutes before.  There were five dogs.  And they were running hard.  They, too, were being flogged, and the man driving them was shouting furiously in his urgency.

Suddenly there was a leap of flame and a shot rang out.  It came from the driver of the fleeing dog train.  It was replied to on the instant by Gouter who lost not a second.  His own shot sped even as the enemy’s bullet whistled somewhere past his head.  He fired again.  A third shot split the air.  And with that last shot the enemy’s sled seemed to leap in the air.  There was a moment of hideous confusion.  Then the wreckage dropped away behind the pursuers, sprawled and still in the snow.