Had the golden snare been taken from the equation—­had he not felt the thrill of it in his fingers and looked upon the warm fires of it as it lay unbound on Pierre Breault’s table, his present relation with Bram Johnson he would have considered as a purely physical condition, and he might then have accepted the presence of the rifle there within his reach as a direct invitation from Providence.

As it was, he knew that the master of the wolves was speeding swiftly to the source of the golden snare.  From the moment he had seen the strange transformation it had worked in Bram that belief within him had become positive.  And now, as his eyes turned from the inspection of the sledge to Bram and his wolves, he wondered where the trail was taking him.  Was it possible that Bram was striking straight north for Coronation Gulf and the Eskimo?  He had noted that the polar bear skin was only slightly worn—­that it had not long been taken from the back of the animal that had worn it.  He recalled what he could remember of his geography.  Their course, if continued in the direction Bram was now heading, would take them east of the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and they would hit the Arctic somewhere between Melville Sound and the Coppermine River.  It was a good five hundred miles to the Eskimo settlements there.  Bram and his wolves could make it in ten days, possibly in eight.

If his guess was correct, and Coronation Gulf was Bram’s goal, he had found at least one possible explanation for the tress of golden hair.

The girl or woman to whom it had belonged had come into the north aboard a whaling ship.  Probably she was the daughter or the wife of the master.  The ship had been lost in the ice—­she had been saved by the Eskimo—­and she was among them now, with other white men.  Philip pictured it all vividly.  It was unpleasant—­horrible.  The theory of other white men being with her he was conscious of forcing upon himself to offset the more reasonable supposition that, as in the case of the golden snare, she belonged to Bram.  He tried to free himself of that thought, but it clung to him with a tenaciousness that oppressed him with a grim and ugly foreboding.  What a monstrous fate for a woman!  He shivered.  For a few moments every instinct in his body fought to assure him that such a thing could not happen.  And yet he knew that it could happen.  A woman up there—­with Bram!  A woman with hair like spun gold—­and that giant half-mad enormity of a man!

He clenched his hands at the picture his excited brain was painting for him.  He wanted to jump from the sledge, overtake Bram, and demand the truth from him.  He was calm enough to realize the absurdity of such action.  Upon his own strategy depended now whatever answer he might make to the message chance had sent to him through the golden snare.