“He only left this morning,” supplemented Dick, examining the frost-crystals in the new-cut trail.

Without wasting further attention, they set out in pursuit.  The girl followed.  Dick turned to her.

“I think we shall catch him very soon,” said he, in Ojibway.

The girl’s face brightened and her eyes filled.  The simple words admitted her to confidence, implied that she, too, had her share in the undertaking, her interest in its outcome.  She stepped forward with winged feet of gladness.

Luckily a light wind had sprung up against them.  They proceeded as quietly and as swiftly as they could.  In a short time they came to a spot where Jingoss had boiled tea.  This indicated that he must have started late in the morning to have accomplished only so short a distance before noon.  The trail, too, became fresher.

Billy, the regular lead dog, on this occasion occupied his official position ahead, although, as has been pointed out, he was sometimes alternated with the hound, who now ran just behind him.  Third trotted Wolf, a strong beast, but a stupid; then Claire, at the sledge, sagacious, alert, ready to turn the sledge from obstruction.  For a long, time all these beasts, with the strange intelligence of animals much associated with man, had entertained a strong interest in the doings of their masters.  Something besides the day’s journey was in the wind.  They felt it through their keen instinctive responsiveness to the moods of those over them; they knew it by the testimony of their bright eyes which told them that these investigations and pryings were not all in an ordinary day’s travel.  Investigations and pryings appeal to a dog’s nature.  Especially did Mack, the hound, long to be free of his harness that he, too, might sniff here and there in odd nooks and crannies, testing with that marvelously keen nose of his what his masters regarded so curiously.  Now at last he understood from the frequent stops and examinations that the trail was the important thing.  From time to time he sniffed of it deeply, saturating his memory with the quality of its effluvia.  Always it grew fresher.  And then at last the warm animal scent rose alive to his nostrils, and he lifted his head and bayed.

The long, weird sound struck against the silence with the impact of a blow.  Nothing more undesirable could have happened.  Again Mack bayed, and the echoing bell tones of his voice took on a strange similarity to a tocsin of warning.  Rustling and crackling across the men’s fancies the influences of the North moved invisible, alert, suddenly roused.

Dick whirled with an exclamation, throwing down and back the lever of his Winchester, his face suffused, his eye angry.

“Damnation!” exclaimed Bolton, anticipating his intention, and springing forward in time to strike up the muzzle of the rifle, though not soon enough to prevent the shot.

Against the snow, plastered on a distant tree, the bullet hit, scattering the fine powder; then ricochetted, shrieking with increasing joy as it mounted the upper air.  After it, as though released by its passage from the spell of the great frost, trooped the voices and echoes of the wilderness.  In the still air such a racket would carry miles.