as silent as the trees, the dogs pulling noiselessly in their traces like slinking shadows, the ghost-like desolation about him, all recalled him to that other factor in the game, who was DeBar the outlaw, and not DeBar the man.  In this same way, he imagined, Forbes, Bannock, Fleisham and Gresham had begun the game, and they had lost.  Perhaps they, too, had gone out weakened by visions of the equity of things, for the sympathy of man for man is strong when they meet above the sixtieth.

DeBar was ahead of him—­DeBar the outlaw, watching and scheming as he had watched and schemed when the other four had played against him.  The game had grown old to him.  It had brought him victim after victim, and each victim had made of him a more deadly enemy of the next.  Perhaps at this moment he was not very far ahead, waiting to send him the way of the others.  The thought urged new fire into Philip’s blood.  He spurted past the dogs and stopped the Chippewayan, and then examined the trail.  It was old.  The frost had hardened in the huge footprints of DeBar’s big hound; it had built a webby film over the square impressions of his snow-shoe thongs.  But what of that?  Might not the trail still be old, and DeBar a few hundred yards ahead of him, waiting—­watching?

He went back to the sledge and unstrapped his carbine.  In a moment the first picture, the first sympathy, was gone.  It was not the law which DeBar was fighting now.  It was himself.  He walked ahead of the Indian, alert, listening and prepared.  The crackling of a frost-bitten tree startled him into stopping; the snapping of a twig under its weight of ice and snow sent strange thrills through him which left him almost sweating.  The sounds were repeated again and again as they advanced, until he became accustomed to them.  Yet at each new sound his fingers gripped tighter about his carbine and his heart beat a little faster.  Once or twice he spoke to the Indian, who understood no word he said and remained silent.  They built a fire and cooked their supper when it grew too dark to travel.

Later, when it became lighter, they went on hour after hour, through the night.  At dawn the trail was still old.  There were the same cobwebs of frost, the same signs to show that DeBar and his Mackenzie hound had preceded them a long time before.  During the next day and night they spent sixteen hours on their snow-shoes and the lacework of frost in DeBar’s trail grew thinner.  The next day they traveled fourteen and the next twelve, and there was no lacework of frost at all.  There were hot coals under the ashes of DeBar’s fires.  The crumbs of his bannock were soft.  The toes of his Mackenzie hound left warm, sharp imprints.  It was then that they came to the frozen water of the Chariot.  The Chippewayan turned back to Fond du Lac, and Philip went on alone, the two dogs limping behind him with his outfit.