She straightened up to face Blake.  She had chosen her position, and Blake was standing clear and unshadowed in the starlight half a dozen paces from her.  She had thrust her hood back a little, inspired by her feminine instinct to let him see her contempt for him.

“You beast!”

The words hissed hot and furious from her lips, and in that same instant Blake found himself staring straight into the unquivering muzzle of her revolver.

“You beast!” she repeated.  “I ought to kill you.  I ought to shoot you down where you stand, for you are a cur and a coward.  I know what you have planned.  I followed you when you went to Rydal’s cabin a little while ago, and I heard everything that passed between you.  Listen, Peter, and I’ll tell you what these brutes were going to do with us.  You were to go with the six-dog team and I with the five, and out on the barrens we were to become separated, you to go on and be killed when you we’re a proper distance away, and I to be brought back—­to Rydal.  Do you understand, Peter dear?  Isn’t it splendid that we should have forced on us like this such wonderful material for a story!”

She was gloriously unafraid now.  A paean of triumph rang in her voice, triumph, contempt, and utter fearlessness.  Her mittened hand pressed on Peter’s shoulder, and before the weapon in her other hand Blake stood as if turned into stone.

“You don’t know,” she said, speaking to him directly, “how near I am to killing you.  I think I shall shoot unless you have the meat and kindlings put on Peter’s sledge immediately and give Uppy instructions—­in English—­to drive us to Fort Confidence.  Peter and I will both go with the six-dog sledge.  Give the instructions quickly, Mr. Blake!”

Blake, recovering from the shock she had given him, flashed back at her his cool and cynical smile.  In spite of being caught in an unpleasant lie, he admired this golden-haired, blue-eyed slip of a woman for the colossal bluff she was playing.  “Personally, I’m sorry,” he said, “but I couldn’t help it.  Rydal—­”

“I am sure, unless you give the instructions quickly, that I shall shoot,” she interrupted him.  Her voice was so quiet that Peter was amazed.  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Keith.  But—­”

A flash of fire blinded him, and with the flash Blake staggered back with a cry of pain and stood swaying unsteadily in the starlight, clutching with one hand at an arm which hung limp and useless at his side.

“That time, I broke your arm,” said Dolores, with scarcely more excitement than if she had made a bull’s-eye on the Piping Rock range.  “If I fire again, I am quite positive that I shall kill you!”

The Eskimos had not moved.  They were like three lifeless, staring gargoyles.  For another second or two Blake stood clutching at his arm.  Then he said,

“Uppy, put the dog meat and the kindlings on the big sledge—­and drive like hell for Fort Confidence!” And then, before she could stop him, he followed up his words swiftly and furiously in Eskimo.