For several hours Philip remained in the shelter of Hodges’ office.  With early dawn he stole out into the forest, and a little later made his appearance in camp, saying that he had spent the night at Le Pas.  Not until an hour later was it discovered that Hodges had been killed, the guard made a prisoner, and that Thorpe and his wife were gone.  Philip at once took charge of affairs and put a strain on his professional knowledge by declaring that Thorpe had undoubtedly fled into the North.  Early in the afternoon he started in pursuit.

A dozen miles north of the Wekusko camp he swung at right angles to the west, traveled fifteen miles, then cut a straight course south.  It was three days later before he showed up at Le Pas, and learned that no one had seen or heard of Thorpe and his wife.  Two days later he walked into MacGregor’s office.  The inspector fairly leaped from his chair to greet him.

“You got them, Steele!” he cried.  “You got them after the mur—­the killing of Hodges?”

Philip handed him a crumpled bit of paper.

“Those were your latest instructions, sir,” he replied quietly.  “I followed them to the letter.”

MacGregor read, and his face turned as white as the paper he held.  “Good God!” he gasped.

He reeled rather than walked back to his desk, dropped into a chair and buried his face in his arms, his shoulders shaking like those of a sobbing boy.  It was a long time before he looked up, and during these minutes Philip, with his head bowed low to the other, told him of all that had happened in the little room at Wekusko.  But he did not say that it was he who had surprised the guard and released Thorpe and his wife.

At last MacGregor raised his head.

“Philip,” he said, taking the young man’s hand in both his own, “since she was a little girl and I a big, strapping playmate of nineteen, I have loved her.  She is the only girl—­the only woman—­I have ever loved.  You understand?  I am almost old enough to be her father.  She was never intended for me.  But things like this happen—­sometimes, and when she came to plead with me the other day I almost yielded.  That is why I chose you, warned you—­”

He stopped, and a sob rose in his breast.

“And at last you did yield,” said Philip.

The inspector gazed at him for a moment in silence.  Then he said:  “It was ten years ago, on her seventeenth birthday, that I made her a present of a little silver-bound autograph book, and on the first page of that book I wrote the words which saved her husband—­and her.  Do you understand now, Philip?  It was her last card, and she played it well.”

He smiled faintly, and then said, as if to no one but himself, “God bless her!”

He looked down on the big, tawny head that was bowed again upon the desk, and placed his hands on the other’s shoulders.

“God bless her!” echoed Philip.