Philip broke it, almost in a whisper.

“Why don’t you kill me—­here—­now-while I’m sitting helpless beside you, and you’ve a knife in your belt?”

DeBar lifted his head slowly and looked with astonishment into his companion’s face.

“I’m not a murderer!” he said.

“But you’ve killed other men,” persisted Philip.

“Three, besides those we hung,” replied DeBar calmly.  “One at Moose Factory, when I tried to help John, and the other two up here.  They were like you—­hunting me down, and I killed ’em in fair fight.  Was that murder?  Should I stand by and be shot like an animal just because it’s the law that’s doing it?  Would you?”

He rose without waiting for an answer and felt of the clothes beside the fire.

“Dry enough,” he said.  “Put ’em on and we’ll be hiking.”

Philip dressed, and looked at his compass.

“Still north?” he asked.  “Chippewayan is south and west.”

“North,” said DeBar.  “I know of a breed who lives on Red Porcupine Creek, which runs into the Slave.  If we can find him we’ll get grub, and if we don’t—­”

He laughed openly into the other’s face.

“We won’t fight,” said Philip, understanding him.

“No, we won’t fight, but we’ll wrap up in the same blankets, and die, with Woonga, there, keeping our backs warm until the last.  Eh, Woonga, will you do that?”

He turned cheerily to the dog, and Woonga rose slowly and with unmistakable stiffness of limb, and was fastened in the sledge traces.

They went on through the desolate gloom of afternoon, which in late winter is, above the sixtieth, all but night.  Ahead of them there seemed to rise billow upon billow of snow-mountains, which dwarfed themselves into drifted dunes when they approached, and the heaven above them, and the horizon on all sides of them were shut out from their vision by a white mist which was intangible and without substance and yet which rose like a wall before their eyes.  It was one chaos of white mingling with another chaos of white, a chaos of white earth smothered and torn by the Arctic wind under a chaos of white sky; and through it all, saplings that one might have twisted and broken over his knee were magnified into giants at a distance of half a hundred paces, and men and dog looked like huge specters moving with bowed heads through a world that was no longer a world of life, but of dead and silent things.  And up out of this, after a time, rose DeBar’s voice, chanting in tones filled with the savagery of the North, a wild song that was half breed and half French, which the forest men sing in their joy when coming very near to home.