He set off without horse or gun and with only a lump of tallow in his pocket as food.  The distance was seventy-five miles.  At first he ran on winged feet—­feet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches sticking up through the drifts.  By the time you have run half a day beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail—­you are hungry.  Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to snatch handfuls of snow to quench his thirst.  At night he kindled a roaring big white-man fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness off, heard the muffled echo come back to him in smothered voice, and at first streak of dawn ran on, and on, and on.

By the second night Hall had eaten all his tallow.  He had also reefed in his belt so that his stomach and spine seemed to be camping together.  The snow continued to fall.  The trees swam past him as he ran.  And the snowdrifts lifted and fell as he jogged heavily forward.  Of course, he declared to himself, he was not dizzy.  It was the snow blindness or the drifts.  He was well aware the second night that if he would have let himself he would have dug a sleeping hole in the snow and wrapped himself in a snow blanket and slept and slept; but he thrashed himself awake, and set out again, dead heavy with sleep, weak from fatigue, staggering from hunger; and the wings on his feet had become weighted with lead.

He knew it was all up with him when he fell.  He knew if he could get only a half hour’s sleep, it would freshen him up so he could go on.  Lots of winter travelers have known that in the North; and they have taken the half hour’s sleep; and another half hour’s; and have never wakened.  Anyway, something wakened Hall.  He heard the crackle of a branch.  That was nothing.  Branches break to every storm, but this was like branches breaking under a moccasin.  It was unbelievable; there was not the slightest odor of smoke, unless the dream odor of his own delirious hunger; but not twenty paces ahead crackled an Indian fire, surrounded by buckskin tepees, Indians warming themselves by the fire.

With an unspeakable revulsion of hope and hunger, Hall flung to his feet and dashed into the middle of the encampment.  Then a tingling went over his body like the wakening from death, of frost to life—­blind stabbing terror obsessed his body and soul; for the fire was smokeless, the figures were speechless, transparent, unaware of his presence, very terribly still.  His first thought was that he had come on some camp hopeless from the disaster of massacre or starvation.  Then he knew this was no earthly camp.  He could not tell how the