From this point Pierre marked off accurately the direction Bram had taken the morning after the hunt, and Philip drew the point of his compass to the now invisible trail.  Almost instantly he drew his conclusion.

“Bram is keeping to the scrub timber along the edge of the Barren,” he said to Pierre.  “That is where I shall follow.  You might add that much to what I have written to MacVeigh.  But about the snare, Pierre Breault, say not a word.  Do you understand?  If he is a loup-garou man, and weaves golden hairs out of the winds—­”

“I will say nothing, M’sieu,” shuddered Pierre.

They shook hands, and parted in silence.  Philip set his face to the west, and a few moments later, looking back, he could no longer see Pierre.  For an hour after that he was oppressed by the feeling that he was voluntarily taking a desperate chance.  For reasons which he had arrived at during the night he had left his dogs and sledge with Pierre, and was traveling light.  In his forty-pound pack, fitted snugly to his shoulders, were a three pound silk service-tent that was impervious to the fiercest wind, and an equal weight of cooking utensils.  The rest of his burden, outside of his rifle, his Colt’s revolver and his ammunition, was made up of rations, so much of which was scientifically compressed into dehydrated and powder form that he carried on his back, in a matter of thirty pounds, food sufficient for a month if he provided his meat on the trail.  The chief article in this provision was fifteen pounds of flour; four dozen eggs he carried in one pound of egg powder; twenty-eight pounds of potatoes in four pounds of the dehydrated article; four pounds of onions in a quarter of a pound of the concentration, and so on through the list.

He laughed a little grimly as he thought of this concentrated efficiency in the pack on his shoulders.  In a curious sort of way it reminded him of other days, and he wondered what some of his old-time friends would say if he could, by some magic endowment, assemble them here for a feast on the trail.  He wondered especially what Mignon Davenport would say—­and do.  P-f-f-f!  He could see the blue-blooded horror in her aristocratic face!  That wind from over the Barren would curdle the life in her veins.  She would shrivel up and die.  He considered himself a fairly good judge in the matter, for once upon a time he thought that he was going to marry her.  Strange why he should think of her now, he told himself; but for all that he could not get rid of her for a time.  And thinking of her, his mind traveled back into the old days, even as he followed over the hidden trail of Bram.  Undoubtedly a great many of his old friends had forgotten him.  Five years was a long time, and friendship in the set to which he belonged was not famous for its longevity.  Nor love, for that matter.  Mignon had convinced him of that.  He grimaced, and in the teeth of the wind he chuckled.  Fate was a playful old chap.