Suddenly he stopped.  And Peter’s body grew tense.  Both faced the round hole, half filled with softly packed snow, which McKay had cut as a door into the heart of the big drift.  They had grown accustomed to the tumult of the storm.  Its strange wailings and the shrieking voices which at times seemed borne in the moaning sweep of it no longer sent shivers of apprehension through Peter.  But in that moment when both turned to listen there came a sound which was not like the other sounds they had heard.  It was a voice—­not one of the phantom voices of the screaming wind, but a voice so real and so near that for a beat or two even Jolly Roger McKay’s heart stood still.  It was as if a man, standing just beyond their snow barricade, had shouted a name.  But there came no second call.  The wind lulled, so that for a space there was stillness outside.

Jolly Roger laughed a little uneasily.

“Good thing we don’t believe in ghosts, Peter, or we would swear it was a Loup-Garou smelling us through the wall!” He thumbed the tobacco down in his pine, and nodded.  “Then—­there is South America,” he said.  “They have everything down there—­the biggest rivers in the world, the biggest mountains, and so much room that even a Loup-Garou couldn’t hunt us out.  She will love it, Pied-Bot.  But if it happens she likes Africa better, or Australia, or the South Sea—­Now, what the devil was that?”

Peter had jumped as if stung, and for a moment Jolly Roger sat tense as a carven Indian.  Then he rose to his feet, a look of perplexity and doubt in his eyes.

“What was it, Peter?  Can the wind shoot a gun—­like that?”

Peter was sniffing at the loosely blocked door of their snow-room.  A whimper rose in his throat.  He looked up at Jolly Roger, his eyes glowing fiercely through the mass of Airedale whiskers that covered his face.  He wanted to dig.  He wanted to plunge out into the howling darkness.  Slowly McKay beat the ash out of his pipe and placed the pipe in his pocket.

“We’ll take a look,” he said, something repressive in his voice.  “But it isn’t reasonable, Peter.  It is the wind.  There couldn’t be a man out there, and it wasn’t a rifle we heard.  It is the wind—­ with the devil himself behind it!”

With a few sweeps of his hands and arms he scooped out the loose snow from the hole.  The opening was on the sheltered side of the drift, and only the whirling eddies of the storm swept about him as he thrust out his head and shoulders.  But over him it was rushing like an avalanche.  He could hear nothing but the moaning advance of it.  And he could see nothing.  He held out his hand before his face, and blackness swallowed it.

“We have been chased so much that we’re what you might call super-sensitive,” he said, pulling himself back and nodding at Peter in the gray light of the alcohol lamp.  “Guess we’d better turn in, boy.  This is a good place to sleep—­plenty of fresh air, no mosquitoes or black flies, and the police so far away that we will soon forget how they look.  If you say so we will have a nip of cold tea and a bite—­”