“We must have ice, Phil—­finely chopped ice from the creek down there.  Will you take the ax and those two pails and bring back both pails full?  No hurry, but we’ll need it within an hour.”

Philip bundled himself in his coat and went out with the ax and pails.

“Ice!” he muttered to himself.  “Now what can he want of ice?”

He dug down through three feet of snow and chopped for half an hour.  When he returned to the cabin the wounded man was bolstered up in bed, and the doctor was pacing back and forth across the room, evidently worked to a high pitch of excitement.

“Murder—­robbery—­outrage!  Right under our noses, that’s what it was!” he cried.  “Pierre Thoreau is dead—­killed by the scoundrels who left this man for dead beside him!  They set upon them late yesterday afternoon as Pierre and his partner were coming home, intending to kill them for their outfit.  The murderers, who are a breed and a white trapper, have probably gone to their shack half a dozen miles up the creek.  Now, Mr. Philip Steele, here’s a little work for you!”

MacGregor himself had never stirred Philip Steele’s blood as did the doctor’s unexpected wards, but the two men watching him saw nothing unusual in their effect.  He set down his ice and coolly took off his coat, then advanced to the side of the wounded man.

“I’m glad you’re better,” he said, looking down into the other’s strong, pale face.  “It was a pretty close shave.  Guess you were a little out of your head, weren’t you?”

For an instant the man’s eyes shifted past Philip to where the doctor was standing.

“Yes—­I must have been.  He says I was calling for Pierre, and Pierre was dead.  I left him ten miles back there in the snow.”  He closed his eyes with a groan of pain and continued, after a moment, “Pierre and I have been trapping foxes.  We were coming back with supplies to last us until late spring when—­it happened.  The white man’s name is Dobson, and there’s a breed with him.  Their shack is six or seven miles up the creek.”

Philip saw the doctor examining a revolver which he had taken from the pocket of his big coat.  He came over to the bunkside with it in his hand.

“That’s enough, Phil,” he said softly.  “He must not talk any more for an hour or two or we’ll have him in a fever.  Get on your coat.  I’m going with you.”

“I’m going alone,” said Phil shortly.  “You attend to your patient.”  He drank a cup of coffee, ate a piece of toasted bannock, and with the first gray breaking of dawn started up the creek on a pair of Pierre’s old snow-shoes.  The doctor followed him to the creek and watched him until he was out of sight.

The wounded man was sitting on the edge of the cot when McGill reentered the cabin.

His exertion had brought a flush of color back into his face, which lighted up with a smile as the other came through the door.

“It was a close shave, thanks to you,” he said, repeating Philip’s words.