The forest people were three quarters of a mile from this open when they came upon the trail of the lone caribou hunter.  Where he had stood and looked up at them the snow was beaten down; from that spot his back-trail began first in a cautious, crouching retreat that changed swiftly into the long running steps of a man in haste.  Like a dog, Kaskisoon hovered over the warm trail.  His eyes glittered, and he held out his hands, palms downward, and looked at Adare.

“The snow still crumbles in the footmarks,” he said in Cree.  “They are expecting us.”

Adare turned to the men behind him.

“You who have brought axes cut logs with which to batter in the doors,” he said.  “We will not ask them to surrender.  We must make them fight, so that we may have an excuse to kill them.  Two logs for eight men each.  And you others fill your pockets with birch bark and spruce pitch-knots.  Let no man touch fire to a log until we have Josephine.  Then, burn!  And you, Kaskisoon, go ahead and watch what is happening!”

He was calmer now.  As the men turned to obey his commands he laid a hand on Philip’s shoulder.

“I told you this was coming, Boy,” he said huskily.  “But I didn’t think it meant her.  My God, if they have harmed her—­”

His breath seemed choking him.

“They dare not!” breathed Philip.

John Adare looked into the white fear of the other’s face.  There was no hiding of it:  the same terrible dread that was in his own.

“If they should, we will kill them by inches, Philip!” he whispered.  “We will cut them into bits that the moose-birds can carry away.  Great God, they shall roast over fires!” He hurried toward the men who were already chopping at spruce timber.  Philip looked about for Jean.  He had disappeared.  A hundred yards ahead of them he had caught up with Kaskisoon, and side by side the Indian and the half-breed were speeding now over the man-trail.  Perhaps in the hearts of these two, of all those gathered in this hour of vengeance, there ran deepest the thirst for blood.  With Kaskisoon it was the dormant instinct of centuries of forebears, roused now into fierce desire.  With Jean it was necessity.

In the face of John Adare’s words that there was to be no quarter, Jean still feared the possibility of a parley, a few minutes of truce, the meaning of which sent a shiver to the depths of his soul.  He said nothing to the Cree.  And Kaskisoon’s lips were as silent as the great flakes of snow that began to fall about them now in a mantle so thick that it covered their shoulders in the space of two hundred yards.  When the timber thinned out Kaskisoon picked his way with the caution of a lynx.  At the edge of the clearing they crouched side by side behind a low windfall, and peered over the top.

Three hundred yards away was the Nest.  The man whose trail they had followed had disappeared.  And then, suddenly, the door opened, and there poured out a crowd of excited men.  The lone hunter was ahead of them, talking and pointing toward the forest.  Jean counted—­eight, ten, eleven—­and his eyes searched for Lang and Thoreau.  He cursed the thick snow now.  Through it he could not make them out.  He had drawn back the hammer of his rifle.