Eight feet he gained, then ten.  His color heightened, the repressed arteries throbbed above the gaudy neckerchief, the skulking animal intensified in the tightened muscles of the temples.  As many feet again; but a few more minutes—­then liberty and life.  The better to guard his movements, his gaze fell.  Out and down went his right hand, then his left, as his lithe body slid forward.  Again he glanced up, paused—­and on the instant every muscle of his tense body went suddenly lax.  Instead of the closed eyes and sleeping face he had expected, two steady eyes were giving him back look for look.  There had not been a motion; the face was yet that of a sleeper; the chest still rose and fell steadily; but the eyes!

Tom Blair’s teeth ground each other like those of a dog with rabies.  The suggestion of froth came to his lips.

“Curse you!” he cried.  “Curse you forever!”

A moment they lay so, a moment wherein the last vestige of hope left the mind of the captive; but in it Ben Blair spoke no word.  Maddening, immeasurably worse than denunciation, was that relentless silence.  It was uncanny; and the bearded man felt the hairs of his head rising as the mane of a dog or a wolf lifts at a sound it does not understand.

“Say something,” he pleaded desperately.  “Shoot me, kill me, do anything—­but don’t look at me like that!” and, fairly writhing, he crawled back to his blanket and buried his head in its depths.

With the coming of evening coolness, Ben again made preparation for the journey.  Neither of the men made reference to the incidents of the day, but on Tom Blair’s face there was a new expression, like that of a criminal on his passage from the cell to the hangman’s trap.  If the younger man saw it, he gave no sign; and as on the night before, they jogged ahead.  Before daylight broke, the comparatively smooth bed of Bad River merged into the irregular surface of the Missouri.  Then they halted.  Why they stopped there, Tom Blair could not at the time tell; but with the coming of daylight he understood.  Where he had crossed and Ben had followed there was not now a single track, but many—­a score at least.  At the margin of the stream, where the cavalcade had stopped, the snow was tramped hard as a stockade; and in the centre of the beaten place, distinct against the white, was a dark spot where a great camp-fire had been built.  At the river the party had stopped.  Obviously, there the last snow had obliterated the trail, and, seeing that they had turned back, Tom Blair gave a sigh of relief.  Whatever the future had in store for him, it could reveal nothing so fearful as a meeting with those whom intuition told him had made up that party.

But his relief was short-lived.  Again, after they had breakfasted from the grouse in the pack, Ben ordered the onward march, along the bank of the great river.  As they moved ahead, a realization of their destination at last came to the captive, and for the first time he balked.