“Little hope, but the search will begin from there,” replied the doctor.  “I have more hope at Chippewayan, where we struck a clew.  I sent back my Indian to follow it up.”

They went to bed.  How long he had slept Philip had no idea, when he was awakened by a slight noise.  In a sub-conscious sort of way, with his eyes still closed, he lay without moving and listened.  The sound came again, like the soft, cautious tread of feet near him.  Still without moving he opened his eyes.  The oil lamp which he had put out on retiring was burning low.  In its dim light stood the doctor, half dressed, in a tense attitude of listening.

“What’s the matter?” asked Philip.

The professor started, and turned toward the stove.

“Nervousness, I guess,” he said gloomily.  “I was afraid I would awaken you.  I’ve been up three times during the last hour—­listening for a voice.”

“A voice?”

“Yes, back there in the bunk I could have sworn that I heard it calling somewhere out in the night.  But when I get up I can’t hear it.  I’ve stood at the door until I’m frozen.”

“It’s the wind,” said Philip.  “It has troubled me many times out on the snow plains.  I’ve heard it wail like children crying among the dunes, and again like women screaming, and men shouting.  You’d better go to bed.”

“Listen!” The doctor stiffened, his white face turned to the door.

“Good Heavens, was that the wind?” he asked after a moment.

Philip had rolled from his bunk and was pulling on his clothes.

“Dress and we’ll find out,” he advised.

Together they went to the door, opened it, and stepped outside.  The sky was thick and heavy, with only a white blur where the moon was smothered.  Fifty yards away the gray gloom became opaque.  Over the thousand miles of drift to the north there came a faint whistling wind, rising at times in fitful sweeps of flinty snow, and at intervals dying away until it became only a lulling sound.  In one of these intervals both men held their breath.

From somewhere out of the night, and yet from nowhere that they could point, there came a human voice.

“Pier-r-r-r-e Thoreau—­Pier-r-r-r-e Thoreau—­Ho, Pierre Thoreau-u-u-u!”

“Off there!” shivered the doctor.

“No—­out there!” said Philip.

He raised his own voice in an answering shout, and in response there came again the cry for Pierre Thoreau.

“I’m right!” cried the doctor.  “Come!”

He darted away, his greatcoat making a dark blur in the night ahead of Philip, who paused again to shout through the megaphone of his hands.  There came no reply.  A second and a third time he shouted, and still there was no response.

“Queer,” he thought.  “What the devil can it mean?”

The doctor had disappeared, and he followed in the direction he had gone.  A hundred yards more and he saw the dark blur again, close to the ground.  The doctor was bending over a human form stretched out in the snow.