Her joy when she saw that he understood her added to the uncertainty which was beginning to grip him in spite of all that the day had meant for him.  Her faith in him, since that thrilling moment in the darkness, was more than ever like that of a child.  She was unafraid of Bram now.  She was unafraid of the wolves and the storm and the mysterious pursuers from out of the north.  Into his keeping she had placed herself utterly, and while this knowledge filled him with a great happiness he was now disturbed by the fact that, if they escaped from the cabin and the Eskimos, she believed he would return with her down the Coppermine in an effort to find her father.  He had already made the plans for their escape and they were sufficiently hazardous.  Their one chance was to strike south across the thin arm of the Barren for Pierre Breault’s cabin.  To go in the opposite direction—­farther north without dogs or sledge—­would be deliberate suicide.

Several times during the afternoon he tried to bring himself to the point of urging on her the naked truth—­that her father was dead.  There was no doubt of that—­not the slightest.  But each time he fell a little short.  Her confidence in the belief that her father was alive, and that he was where she had marked the cross on the map, puzzled him.  Was it conceivable, he asked himself, that the Eskimos had some reason for not killing Paul Armin, and that Celie was aware of the fact?  If so he failed to discover it.  Again and again he made Celie understand that he wanted to know why the Eskimos wanted her, and each time she answered him with a hopeless little gesture, signifying that she did not know.  He did learn that there were two other white men with Paul Armin.

Only by looking at his watch did he know when the night closed in.  It was seven o’clock when he led Celie to her room and urged her to go to bed.  An hour later, listening at her door, he believed that she was asleep.  He had waited for that, and quietly he prepared for the hazardous undertaking he had set for himself.  He put on his cap and coat and seized the club he had taken from Bram’s bed.  Then very cautiously he opened the outer door.  A moment later he stood outside, the door closed behind him, with the storm pounding in his face.

Fifty yards away he could not have heard the shout of a man.  And yet he listened, gripping his club hard, every nerve in his body strained to a snapping tension.  Somewhere within that small circle of the corral were Bram Johnson’s wolves, and as he hesitated with his back to the door he prayed that there would come no lull in the storm during the next few minutes.  It was possible that he might evade them with the crash and thunder of the gale about him.  They could not see him, or hear him, or even smell him in that tumult of wind unless on his way to the gate he ran into them.  In that moment he would have given a year of life to have known where they were.  Still listening, still fighting to hear