said he would do, and lays you out—­though it wasn’t your fault after all.  Then you take possession of another man’s shack when he isn’t at home, eat his grub, nurse a broken head, and wonder why the devil you ever joined the glorious Royal Mounted when you’ve got money to burn.  You’re a wise one, you are, Phil Steele—­but you’ve learned something new.  You’ve learned there’s never a man so good but there’s a better one somewhere—­even if he is a man-killer like Mr. William DeBar.”

He lighted his pipe and went to the door.  For the first time in days the sun was shining in a cold blaze of fire over the southeastern edge of the barrens, which swept away in a limitless waste of snow-dune and rock and stunted scrub among which occasional Indian and half-breed trappers set their dead-falls and poison baits for the northern fox.  Sixty miles to the west was Fort Smith.  A hundred miles to the south lay the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at Chippewayan; a hundred and fifty miles to the south and east was the post at Fond du Lac, and to the north—­nothing.  A thousand miles or so up there one would have struck the polar sea and the Eskimo, and it was with this thought of the lifelessness and mystery of a dead and empty world that Philip turned his eyes from the sun into the gray desolation that reached from Pierre Thoreau’s door to the end of the earth.  Far off to the north he saw a black speck moving in the chaos of white.  It might have been a fox coming over a snow-dune a rifle-shot away, for distances are elusive where the sky and the earth seem to meet in a cold gray rim about one; or it might have been a musk-ox or a caribou at a greater distance, but the longer he looked the more convinced he became that it was none of these—­but a man.  It moved slowly, disappeared for a few minutes in one of the dips of the plain, and came into view again much nearer.  This time he made out a man, and behind, a sledge and dogs.

“It’s Pierre,” he shivered, closing the door and coming back to the stove.  “I wonder what the deuce the breed will say when he finds a stranger here and his grub half gone.”

After a little he heard the shrill creaking of a sledge on the crust outside and then a man’s voice.  The sounds stopped close to the cabin and were followed by a knock at the door.

“Come in!” cried Philip, and in the same breath it flashed upon him that it could not be the breed, and that it must be a mighty particular and unusual personage to knock at all.

The door opened and a man came in.  He was a little man, and was bundled in a great beaver overcoat and a huge beaver cap that concealed all of his face but his eyes, the tip of his nose, and the frozen end of a beard which stuck out between the laps of his turned-up collar like a horn.  For all the world he looked like a diminutive drum-major, and Philip rose speechless, his pipe still in his mouth, as his strange visitor closed the door behind him and approached.