“Stop!” he commanded, his voice croaking harsh across the stillness.

The Indian, with a sob of mingled emotion, in which, strangely enough, relief seemed the predominant note, collapsed to the ground.  The North, insistent on the victory but indifferent to the stake, tossed carelessly the prize at issue into the hands of her beaten antagonist.

And then, dim and ghostly, rank after rank, across the middle distance drifted the caribou herds.

[Illustration:  “Stop!” he commanded, his voice croaking harsh across the stillness]

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was beyond the middle of summer.  The day had been hot, but now the velvet night was descending.  The canoe had turned into the channel at the head of the island on which was situated Conjuror’s House.  The end of the journey was at hand.

Dick paddled in the bow.  His face had regained its freshness, but not entirely its former boyish roundness.  The old air of bravado again sat his spirit—­a man’s nature persists to the end, and immortal and unquenchable youth is a gift of the gods—­but in the depths of his strange, narrow eyes was a new steadiness, a new responsibility, the well-known, quiet, competent look invariably a characteristic of true woodsmen.  At his feet lay the dog, one red-rimmed eye cocked up at the man who had gone down to the depths in his company.

The Indian Jingoss sat amidships, his hands bound strongly with buckskin thongs, a man of medium size, broad face, beady eyes with surface lights.  He had cost much:  he was to be given no chance to escape.  Always his hands remained bound with the buckskin thongs, except at times when Dick or Sam stood over him with a rifle.  At night his wrists were further attached to one of Sam’s.  Mack, too, understood the situation, and guarded as jealously as did his masters.

Sam wielded the steersman’s paddle.  His appearance was absolutely unaffected by this one episode in a long life.

They rounded the point into the main sweep of the east river, stole down along the bank in the gathering twilight, and softly beached their canoe below the white buildings of the Factory.  With a muttered word of command to their captive, they disembarked and climbed the steepness of the low bluff to the grass-plot above.  The dog followed at their heels.

Suddenly the impression of this year, until now so vividly a part of the present, was stricken into the past, the past of memory.  Up to the very instant of topping the bluff it had been life; now it was experience.