They moved quickly now.  Over them the gray heavens seemed to drop lower.  Through the forest swept a far monotone, like the breaking of surf on a distant shore.  With the wind came a thin snow, and the darkness gathered so that beyond the rim of fire-light there was a black chaos in which the form of all things was lost.  It was not a night for talk.  It was filled with the whisperings of storm, and to Philip those whisperings were an oppressive presage of the tragedy that lay that night ahead of them.  The dogs were harnessed, five that Jean had chosen from the pack; and straight out into the pit of gloom the half-breed led them.  In that darkness Philip could see nothing.  But not once did Jean falter, and the dogs followed him, occasionally whining at the strangeness and unrest of the night; and close behind them came Philip.  For a long time there was no sound but the tread of their feet, the scraping of the toboggan, the patter of the dogs, and the wind that bit down from out of the thick sky into the spruce tops.  They had travelled an hour when they came to a place where the smothering weight of the darkness seemed to rise from about them.  It was the edge of a great open, a bit of the Barren that reached down like a solitary finger from the North:  treeless, shrubless, the playground of the foxes and the storm winds.  Here Jean fell back beside Philip for a moment.

“You are not tiring, M’sieur?”

“I am getting stronger every mile,” declared Philip.  “I feel no effects of the blow now, Jean.  How far did you say it was to the place where our people are to meet?”

“Eight miles.  We have come four.  In this darkness we could make it faster without the dogs, but they are carrying a hundred pounds of tepee, guns, and food.”

He urged the dogs on in the open space.  Another hour and they had come again to the edge of forest.  Here they rested.

“There will be some there ahead of us,” said Jean.  “Renault and the other runners will have had more than four hours.  They will have visited a dozen cabins on the trap-lines.  Pierre reached old Kaskisoon and his Swamp Crees in two hours.  They love Josephine next to their Manitou.  The Indians will be there to a man!”

Philip did not reply.  But his heart beat like a drum at the sureness and triumph that thrilled in the half-breed’s voice.  As they went on, he lost account of time in the flashing pictures that came to him of the other actors in this night’s drama; of those half-dozen Paul Reveres of the wilderness speeding like shadows through the mystery of the night, of the thin-waisted, brown-faced men who were spreading the fires of vengeance from cabin to cabin and from tepee to tepee.  Through his lips there came a sobbing breath of exultation, of joy.  He did not tire.  At times he wanted to run on ahead of Jean and the dogs.  Yet he saw that no such desire seized upon Jean.  Steadily—­with a precision that was almost uncanny—­the half-breed led the way.  He did not hurry, he did not hesitate.  He was like a strange spirit of the night itself, a voiceless and noiseless shadow ahead, an automaton of flesh and blood that had become more than human to Philip.  In this man’s guidance he lost his fear for Josephine.