He smote his leg with his mittened fist.  He would go North, straight to old Dugald Murchison, and he would tell him the whole story.  Murchison would help him, and if Wentworth were innocent, then he, Hedin would return to Terrace City and give himself up.  He would not be a fugitive from justice, for justice owed him the chance to prove his innocence.

Once his mind was made up, Hedin rose to his feet and slung the light pack to his back.  Then he lowered the pack, and stood thinking.  He would hit for Pipe Lake, but Hanson, the storekeeper at Pipe Lake, would recognize him.  Tossing his pack aside, he scooped a hole in the snow, built a tiny fire of balsam twigs, and melted some water in his drinking cup.  Then, setting a small hand mirror upon the log, he produced his razor and proceeded to shave off his mustache.  This done, he grinned at himself in the mirror, as he reflected that Hanson had never seen him except in conventional clothing, and that he would never recognize him in mackinaw and larrigans, with his mustache gone.

Once more he stood up, kicked snow over his fire, swung the pack to his back, and started to skirt the swamp.  Then suddenly he halted in his tracks.  There was a mighty crackling of dry twigs close at hand, and a voice commanded gruffly, “Hands up!”

Instinctively Hedin elevated his hands as he stared into the muzzle of a revolver.  Beyond the revolver he saw the grinning face of Mike Duffy, erstwhile lumberjack, then bootlegger, and now policeman; under the Hicks regime.

“Shaved her off, eh?” taunted the man.  “Well, mebbe you’d ‘a’ fooled most folks, but you hain’t fooled me none, special’ as I be’n layin’ in the brush watchin’ you fer half an hour.  You’d of got away from the rest of ’em too.”

XI

Old John McNabb had not been long at his desk when the telephone bell rang and he picked up the receiver.

“Hello—­who?  Hicks?  He—­what?  Where is he now?  Got away!  Well, you get him!  Get him, or I’ll get you!  If he ain’t back in jail to-day, off comes your buttons to-morrow—­do you get that?” Old John banged the receiver onto the hook, and launched what would undoubtedly have been a classic of denunciatory profanity, had it not been interrupted in its inception by Jean, who had slipped into the office unnoticed at the beginning of the telephone conversation.

“Why, Dad!” exclaimed the girl laughing, as the red-faced man whirled upon her in surprise.  “What a beastly temper you are in this morning!  Who got away, and why are you so anxious to have him caught?”

“Oskar got away,” he growled, apparently somewhat mollified by his daughter’s tone.  “Hicks started for jail with him an’ Oskar knocked him down in the alley an’ got away.”

“Oskar!  Jail!  What do you mean?”