Through his window, as he sat bolstered up in his cot, Kent could see the slow-moving shimmer of the great Athabasca River as it moved on its way toward the Arctic Ocean.  The sun was shining, and he saw the cool, thick masses of the spruce and cedar forests beyond, the rising undulations of wilderness ridges and hills, and through that open window he caught the sweet scents that came with a soft wind from out of the forests he had loved for so many years.

“They’ve been my best friends,” he had said to Cardigan, “and when this nice little thing you’re promising happens to me, old man, I want to go with my eyes on them.”

So his cot was close to the window.

Nearest to him sat Cardigan.  In his face, more than in any of the others, was disbelief.  Kedsty, Inspector of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, in charge of N Division during an indefinite leave of absence of the superintendent, was paler even than the girl whose nervous fingers were swiftly putting upon paper every word that was spoken by those in the room.  O’Connor, staff-sergeant, was like one struck dumb.  The little, smooth-faced Catholic missioner whose presence as a witness Kent had requested, sat with his thin fingers tightly interlaced, silently placing this among all the other strange tragedies that the wilderness had given up to him.  They had all been Kent’s friends, his intimate friends, with the exception of the girl, whom Inspector Kedsty had borrowed for the occasion.  With the little missioner he had spent many an evening, exchanging in mutual confidence the strange and mysterious happenings of the deep forests, and of the great north beyond the forests.  O’Connor’s friendship was a friendship bred of the brotherhood of the trails.  It was Kent and O’Connor who had brought down the two Eskimo murderers from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and the adventure had taken them fourteen months.  Kent loved O’Connor, with his red face, his red hair, and his big heart, and to him the most tragic part of it all was that he was breaking this friendship now.

But it was Inspector Kedsty, commanding N Division, the biggest and wildest division in all the Northland, that roused in Kent an unusual emotion, even as he waited for that explosion just over his heart which the surgeon had told him might occur at any moment.  On his death-bed his mind still worked analytically.  And Kedsty, since the moment he had entered the room, had puzzled Kent.  The commander of N Division was an unusual man.  He was sixty, with iron-gray hair, cold, almost colorless eyes in which one would search long for a gleam of either mercy or fear, and a nerve that Kent had never seen even slightly disturbed.  It took such a man, an iron man, to run N Division according to law, for N Division covered an area of six hundred and twenty thousand square miles of wildest North America, extending more than two thousand miles north of the 70th parallel of latitude, with its farthest limit three and one-half degrees within the Arctic Circle.  To police this area meant upholding the law in a country fourteen times the size of the state of Ohio.  And Kedsty was the man who had performed this duty as only one other man had ever succeeded in doing it.