They went on, hour after hour, until day gloom thickened into night, and night drifted upward to give place to gray dawn, plodding steadily north, resting now and then, fighting each mile of the way to the Red Porcupine against the stinging lashes of the Arctic wind.  And through it all it was DeBar’s voice that rose in encouragement to the dog limping behind him and to the man limping behind the dog—­now in song, now in the wild shouting of the sledge-driver, his face thin and gaunt in its starved whiteness, but his eyes alive with a strange fire.  And it was DeBar who lifted his mittened hands to the leaden chaos of sky when they came to the frozen streak that was the Red Porcupine, and said, in a voice through which there ran a strange thrill of something deep and mighty, “God in Heaven be praised, this is the end!”

He started into a trot now, and the dog trotted behind him, and behind the dog trotted Philip, wondering, as he had wondered a dozen times before that night, if DeBar were going mad.  Five hundred yards down the stream DeBar stopped in his tracks, stared for a moment into the breaking gloom of the shore, and turned to Philip.  He spoke in a voice low and trembling, as if overcome for the moment by some strong emotion.

“See—­see there!” he whispered.  “I’ve hit it, Philip Steele, and what does it mean?  I’ve come over seventy miles of barren, through night an’ storm, an’ I’ve hit Pierre Thoreau’s cabin as fair as a shot!  Oh, man, man, I couldn’t do it once in ten thousand times!” He gripped Philip’s arm, and his voice rose in excited triumph.  “I tell ’ee, it means that—­that God—­’r something—­must be with me!”

“With us,” said Philip, staring hard.

“With me,” replied DeBar so fiercely that the other started involuntarily.  “It’s a miracle, an omen, and it means that I’m going to win!” His fingers gripped deeper, and he said more gently, “Phil, I’ve grown to like you, and if you believe in God as we believe in Him up here—­if you believe He tells things in the stars, the winds and things like this, if you’re afraid of death—­take some grub and go back!  I mean it, Phil, for if you stay, an’ fight, there is going to be but one end.  I will kill you!”

Chapter XII.  The Fight—­And A Strange Visitor

At DeBar’s words the blood leaped swiftly through Philip’s veins, and he laughed as he flung the outlaw’s hand from his arm.

“I’m not afraid of death,” he cried angrily.  “Don’t take me for a child, William DeBar.  How long since you found this God of yours?”

He spoke the words half tauntingly, and as soon regretted them, for in a voice that betrayed no anger at the slur DeBar said:  “Ever since my mother taught me the first prayer, Phil.  I’ve killed three men and I’ve helped to hang three others, and still I believe in a God, and I’ve halt a notion He believes a little bit in me, in spite of the laws made down in Ottawa.”