Again his fingers were clenching and unclenching as he stared at Raine.

“You believe me, M’sieu?”

Philip nodded.

“It seems impossible.  And yet—­you could not have been dreaming, Pierre.”

Breault drew a deep breath of satisfaction, and half rose to his feet.

“And you will believe me if I tell you the rest?”

“Yes.”

Swiftly Pierre went to his bunk and returned with the caribou skin pouch in which he carried his flint and steel and fire material for the trail.

“The next day I went back, M’sieu,” he said, seating himself again opposite Philip.  “Bram and his wolves were gone.  He had slept in a shelter of spruce boughs.  And—­and—­par les mille cornes du diable if he had even brushed the snow out!  His great moccasin tracks were all about among the tracks of the wolves, and they were big as the spoor of a monster bear.  I searched everywhere for something that he might have left, and I found—­at last—­a rabbit snare.”

Pierre Breault’s eyes, and not his words—­and the curious twisting and interlocking of his long slim fingers about the caribou-skin bag in his hand stirred Philip with the thrill of a tense and mysterious anticipation, and as he waited, uttering no word, Pierre’s fingers opened the sack, and he said: 

“A rabbit snare, M’sieu, which had dropped from his pocket into the snow—­”

In another moment he had given it into Philip’s hands.  The oil lamp was hung straight above them.  Its light flooded the table between them, and from Philip’s lips, as he stared at the snare, there broke a gasp of amazement.  Pierre had expected that cry.  He had at first been disbelieved; now his face burned with triumph.  It seemed, for a space, as if Philip had ceased breathing.  He stared—­stared—­while the light from above him scintillated on the thing he held.  It was a snare.  There could be no doubt of that.  It was almost a yard in length, with the curious Chippewyan loop at one end and the double-knot at the other.

The amazing thing about it was that it was made of a woman’s golden hair.

CHAPTER III

The process of mental induction occasionally does not pause to reason its way, but leaps to an immediate and startling finality, which, by reason of its very suddenness, is for a space like the shock of a sudden blow.  After that one gasp of amazement Philip made no sound.  He spoke no word to Pierre.  In a sudden lull of the wind sweeping over the cabin the ticking of his watch was like the beating of a tiny drum.  Then, slowly, his eyes rose from the silken thread in his fingers and met Pierre’s.  Each knew what the other was thinking.  If the hair had been black.  If it had been brown.  Even had it been of the coarse red of the blond Eskimo of the upper Mackenzie!  But it was gold—­shimmering gold.