Carr laughed the sort of laugh that sends a chill up one’s back, and drew the caribou-skin cord tight about Falkner’s ankles.

“Can’t blame me for being a little careful,” he said in his revolting way.  “By your hanging I become a Sergeant.  That’s my reward for running you down.”

He lighted the lamp and filled the stove before he left the cabin.  From the door he looked back at Falkner, and his face was not like a man’s, but like that of some terrible death-spirit, ghostly, and thin, and exultant in the dim glow of the lamp.  As he opened the door the roar of the blizzard and a gust of snow filled the cabin.  Then it closed, and a groaning curse fell from Falkner’s lips.  He strained fiercely at the thongs that bound him, but after the first few minutes he lay still breathing hard, knowing that every effort he made only tightened the caribou-skin cord that bound him.

On his back, he listened to the storm.  It was filled with the same strange cries and moaning sound that had almost driven him to madness, and now they sent through him a shivering chill that he had not felt before, even in the darkest and most hopeless hours of his loneliness and despair.  A breath that was almost a sob broke from his lips as a vision of the Girl and the Kid came to shut out from his ears the moaning tumult of the wind.  A few hours before he had been filled with hope—­almost happiness, and now he was lost.  From such a man as Carr there was no hope for mercy, or of escape.  Flat on his back, he closed his eyes, and tried to think—­to scheme something that might happen in his favor, to foresee an opportunity that might give him one last chance.  And then, suddenly, he heard a sound.  It traveled over the blanket that formed a pillow for his head.  A cool, soft little nose touched his ear, and then tiny feet ran swiftly over his shoulder, and halted on his breast.  He opened his eyes, and stared.

“You little cuss!” he breathed.  A hundred times he had spoken those words, and each time they were of increasing wonder and adoration.  “You little cuss!” he whispered again, and he chuckled aloud.

The mouse was humped on his breast in that curious little ball that it made of itself, and was eyeing him, Jim thought, in a questioning sort of way, “What’s the matter with you?” it seemed to ask.  “Where are your hands?”

And Jim answered: 

“They’ve got me, old man.  Now what the dickens are we going to do?”

The mouse began investigating.  It examined his shoulder, the end of his chin, and ran along his arm, as far as it could go.

“Now what do you think of that!” Falkner exclaimed softly.  “The little cuss is wondering where my hands are!” Gently he rolled over on his side.

“There they are,” he said, “hitched tighter ’n bark to a tree!”

He wiggled his fingers, and in a moment he felt the mouse.  The little creature ran across the opened palm of his hand to his wrist, and then every muscle in Falkner’s body grew tense, and one of the strangest cries that ever fell from human lips came from his.  The mouse had found once more the dried hide-flesh of which the snowshoe webs were made.  It had found babiche.  And it had begun to gnaw!