“And this—­” he said.

The doctor laughed as he took the picture from his hand.

“Is Mrs. William Falkner, Phil.  Come in.  I’m anxious to have you meet her.”

Chapter XV.  Philip’s Last Assignment

Philip, instead of following the doctor, laid a detaining hand upon his arm.

“Wait!” he said.

Something in the seriousness of his manner drew a quick look of apprehension over the other’s face.

“I want to talk with you,” continued Philip.  “Let us walk a little way down the trail.”

The doctor eyed him suspiciously as they turned away from the cabin.

“See here, Phil Steele,” he said, and there was a hard ring in his voice, “I’ve had all sorts of confidence in you, and I’ve told you more, perhaps, than I ought.  I don’t suppose you have a suspicion that you ought to break it?”

“No, it isn’t that,” replied Philip, laughing a little uneasily.  “I’m glad you got away with Falkner, and so far as I am concerned no one will ever know what has happened.  It’s I who want to place a little confidence in you now.  I am positively at my wits’ end, and all over a situation which seems to place you and me in a class by ourselves—­sort of brothers in trouble, you know,” and he told McGill, briefly, of Isobel, and his search for her.

“I lost them between Lac Bain and Fort Churchill,” he finished.  “The two sledges separated, one continuing to Churchill, and the other turning into the South.  I followed the Churchill sledge—­and was wrong.  When I came back the snow had covered the other trail.”

The little professor stopped suddenly, and squared himself directly in Philip’s path.

“You don’t say!” he gasped.  There was a look of amazement on his face.

“What a wonderfully little world this is, Phil,” he added, smiling in a curious way.  “What a wonderfully, wonderfully little world it is!  It’s only a playground, after all, and the funny part of it is that it is not even large enough to play a game of hide-and-seek in, successfully.  I’ve proved that beyond question.  And here—­you—­”

“What?” demanded Philip, puzzled by the other’s attitude.

“Well, you see, I went first to Nelson House,” said McGill, “and from there up to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post in the Cochrane River, hunting for Falkner and this girl—­a man and a woman.  And at the Cochrane Post a Frenchman told me that there was a strange man and woman up at Lac Bain, and I set off for there.  That must have been just about the time you were starting for Churchill, for on the third day up I met a sledge that turned me off the Lac Bain trail to take up the nearer trail to Chippewayan.  With this sledge were the two who had been at Lac Bain, Colonel Becker and his daughter.”

For a moment Philip could not speak.  He caught the other’s hand excitedly.

“You—­you found where they were going?” he asked, when McGill did not continue.