“Just so,” replied the doctor.  He had placed a brace of short bulldog revolvers on the table and offered one of them now to his companion.

“The shaving isn’t over yet, Falkner.”

They ate breakfast, each with a gun beside his tin plate.  Now and then the doctor interrupted his meal to go to the door and peer over the broadening vista of the barrens.  They had nearly finished when he came back from one of these observations, his lips set a little tighter, a barely perceptible tremor in his voice when he spoke.

“They’re coming, Falkner!”

They picked up their revolvers and the doctor buttoned his coat tight up about his neck.

For ten minutes they sat silent and listening.

Not until the crunching beat of snow-shoes came to their ears did the doctor move.  Thrusting his weapon into his coat pocket, he went to the door.  Falkner followed him, and stood well out of sight when he opened it.  Two men and a dog team were crossing the opening.  McGill’s dogs were fastened under a brush lean-to built against the cabin, and as the rival team of huskies began filling the air with their clamor for a fight, the stranger team halted and one of the two men came forward alone.  He stopped with some astonishment before the aristocratic-looking little man waiting for him in Pierre’s doorway.

“Is Pierre Thoreau at home?” he demanded.

“I’m a stranger here, so I can not say,” replied the doctor, inspecting the questioner with marked coolness.  “It is possible, however, that he is—­for I picked up a man half dead out in the snow last night, and I’m waiting for him to come back to life.  A smooth-faced, blond fellow, with a cut on his head.  It may be this Pierre Thoreau.”

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the man kicked off his snow-shoes and with an, excited wave of his arm to his companion with the dogs, almost ran past the doctor.

“It’s him—­the man I want to see!” he cried in a low voice.  “My name’s Dobson, of the—­”

What more he had meant to say was never finished.  Falkner’s powerful arms had gripped his head and throat in a vise-like clutch from which no smother of sound escaped, and three or four minutes later, when the second man came through the door, he found his comrade flat on his back, bound and gagged, and the shining muzzles of two short and murderous-looking revolvers leveled at his breast.  He was a swarthy breed, scarcely larger than the doctor himself, and his only remonstrance as his hands were fastened behind his back was a brief outburst of very bad and, very excited French which the professor stopped with a threatening flourish of his gun.

“You’ll do,” he said, standing off to survey his prisoner.  “I believe you’re harmless enough to have the use of your legs and mouth.”  With a comic bow the little doctor added, “M’sieur, I’m going to ask you to drive us back to Fort Smith, and if you so much as look the wrong way out of your eyes I’ll blow off your head.  You and your friend are to answer for the killing of Pierre Thoreau and for the attempted murder of this young man, who will follow us to Fort Smith to testify against you.”