“Don’t come back, Blake, until you’ve got him, dead or alive.”

That is a simple and efficacious formula in the rank and file of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.  It has made volumes of stirring history, because it means a great deal and has been lived up to.  Twice before, the words had been uttered to Blake—­in extreme cases.  The first time they had taken him for six months into the Barren Lands between Hudson’s Bay and the Great Slave—­and he came back with his man; the second time he was gone for nearly a year along the rim of the Arctic—­and from there also he came back with his man.  Blake was of that sort.  A bull-dog, a Nemesis when he was once on the trail, and—­like most men of that kind—­without a conscience.  In the Blue Books of the service he was credited with arduous patrols and unusual exploits.  “Put Blake on the trail” meant something, and “He is one of our best men” was a firmly established conviction at departmental headquarters.

Only one man knew Blake as Blake actually lived under his skin—­and that was Blake himself.  He hunted men and ran them down without mercy—­not because he loved the law, but for the reason that he had in him the inherited instincts of the hound.  This comparison, if quite true, is none the less unfair to the hound.  A hound is a good dog at heart.

In the January storm it may be that the vengeful spirit of Francois Breault set out in company with Corporal Blake to witness the consummation of his vengeance.  That first night, as he sat close to his fire in the shelter of a thick spruce timber, Blake felt the unusual and disturbing sensation of a presence somewhere near him.  The storm was at its height.  He had passed through many storms, but to-night there seemed to be an uncannily concentrated fury in its beating and wailing over the roofs of the forests.

He was physically comfortable.  The spruce trees were so dense that the storm did not reach him, and fortune favored him with a good fire and plenty of fuel.  But the sensation oppressed him.  He could not keep away from him his mental vision of Breault as he had helped to pry him from the sledge—­his frozen features, the stiffened fingers, the curious twist of the icy lips that had been almost a grin.

Blake was not superstitious.  He was too much a man of iron for that.  His soul had lost the plasticity of imagination.  But he could not forget Breault’s lips as they had seemed to grin up at him.  There was a reason for it.  On his last trip down, Breault had said to him, with that same half-grin on his face: 

“M’sieu, some day you may go after my murderer, and when you do, Francois Breault will go with you.”

That was three months ago.  Blake measured the time back as he sucked at his pipe, and at the same time he looked at the shadowy and half-lost forms of his dogs, curled up for the night in the outer rim of firelight.

Over the tree-tops a sudden blast of wind howled.  It was like a monster voice.  Blake rose to his feet and rolled upon the fire the big night log he had dragged in, and to this he added, with the woodman’s craft of long experience, lengths of green timber, so arranged that they would hold fire until morning.  Then he went into his silk service tent and buried himself in his sleeping-bag.