It was still early in the day when Philip crossed the river into the barrens and with each step now his pulse beat faster.  DeBar could not be far ahead of him.  He was sure of that.  Very soon he must overtake him.  And then—­there would be a fight.  In the tense minutes that followed, the vision of Isobel’s beautiful face grew less and less distinct in his mind.  It was filled with something more grim, something that tightened his muscles, kept him ceaselessly alert.  He would come on DeBar—­and there would be a fight.  DeBar would not be taken by surprise.

At noon he halted and built a small fire between two rocks, over which he boiled some tea and warmed his meat.  Each day he had built three fires, but at the end of this day, when darkness stopped him again, it occurred to him that since that morning DeBar had built but one.  Gray dawn had scarcely broken when he again took up the pursuit.  It was bitterly cold, and a biting wind swept down across the barrens from the Arctic icebergs.  His pocket thermometer registered sixty degrees below zero when he left it open on the sledge, and six times between dawn and dusk he built himself fires.  Again DeBar built but one, and this time he found no bannock crumbs.

For the last twenty miles DeBar had gone straight into the North.  He continued straight into the North the next day and several times Philip scrutinized his map, which told him in that direction there lay nothing but peopleless barrens as far as the Great Slave.

There was growing in him now a fear—­a fear that DeBar would beat him out in the race.  His limbs began to ache with a strange pain and his progress was becoming slower.  At intervals he stopped to rest, and after each of these intervals the pain seemed to gnaw deeper at his bones, forcing him to limp, as the dogs were limping behind him.  He had felt it once before, beyond Lac Bain, and knew what it meant.  His legs were giving out—­and DeBar would beat him yet!  The thought stirred him on, and before he stopped again he came to the edge of a little lake.  DeBar had started to cross the lake, and then, changing his mind, had turned back and skirted the edge of it.  Philip followed the outlaw’s trail with his eyes and saw that he could strike it again and save distance by crossing the snow-covered ice.

He went on, with dogs and sledge at his heels, unconscious of the warning underfoot that had turned DeBar back.  In midlake he turned to urge the dogs into a faster pace, and it was then that he heard under him a hollow, trembling sound, growing in volume even as he hesitated, until it surged in under his feet from every shore, like the rolling thunder of a ten-pin ball.  With a loud cry to the dogs he darted forward, but it was too late.  Behind him the ice crashed like brittle glass, and he saw sledge and dogs disappear as if into an abyss.  In an instant he had begun a mad race to the shore a hundred feet ahead of him.  Ten paces more and he would have reached it, when the toe