“We have things our own way, but we must lie low for a while, at least.  MacNair is not licked yet—­by a damn’ sight!  He knows we furnished the booze to his Indians, and he will yell his head off to the Mounted, and we will have them dropping in on us all the winter.  In the meantime leave the liquor where it is.  Don’t bring a gallon of it into this clearing.  It will keep, and we can’t take chances with the Mounted.  There will be enough in it for us, with what we can knock down here, and what the boys can take out of MacNair’s diggings.  They know the gold is there; most of them were in on the stampede when MacNair drove them back a few years ago.  And when they find out that MacNair is in jail, there will be another stampede.  And we will clean up big all around.”

LeFroy, a man of few words, nodded sombrely, and Lapierre, who was impatient to be off to the rivers, failed to note that the nod was far more sombre than usual—­failed, also, to note the pair of china-blue, fishlike eyes that stared impassively at him from behind the goods piled high upon the huge counter.

Once upon the trail, Lapierre lost no time.  As passed the word upon the Mackenzie, where the men who had heard of the arrest of MacNair waited in a frenzy of impatience for the signal that would send them flying over the snow to Snare Lake.  Day and night the man travelled; from the Mackenzie southward the length of Slave and up the Athabasca.  And in his wake men, whose eyes fairly bulged with the greed of gold, jammed their outfits into packs and headed into the North.

At Athabasca Landing he sent a crew into the timber, and hastened on to Edmonton where he purchased a railway ticket for a point that had nothing whatever to do with his destination.  That same night he boarded an east-bound train, and in an early hour of the morning, when the engine paused for water beside a tank that was the most conspicuous building of a little flat town in the heart of a peaceful farming community, he stepped unnoticed from the day coach and proceeded at once to the low, wooden hotel, where he was cautiously admitted through a rear door by the landlord himself, who was, incidentally, Lapierre’s shrewdest and most effective whiskey runner.

It was this Tostoff:  Russian by birth, and crook by nature, whose business it was to disguise the contraband whiskey into innocent-looking freight pieces.  And, it was Tostoff who selected the men and stood responsible for the contraband’s safe conduct over the first stage of its journey to the North.

Tostoff objected strenuously to the running of a consignment in winter, but Lapierre persisted, covering the ground step by step while the other listened with a scowl.

“It’s this way, Tostoff:  For years MacNair has been our chief stumbling-block.  God knows we have trouble enough running the stuff past the Dominion police and the Mounted.  But the danger from the authorities is small in comparison with the danger from MacNair.”  Tostoff growled an assent.  “And now,” continued Lapierre, “for the first time we have him where we want him.”