wilderness side, deep in the forest, the sinister howling of wolves.  He was traveling, literally, the narrow pathway between two worlds.  The river was that pathway.  On the one hand, not so very far away, were the rolling prairies, green fields of grain, settlements and towns and the homes of men; on the other the wilderness lay to the water’s edge with its doors still open to him.  The seventh day a new sound came to his ears at dawn.  It was the whistle of a train at Prince Albert.

There was no change in that whistle, and every nerve-string in his body responded to it with crying thrill.  It was the first voice to greet his home-coming, and the sound of it rolled the yesterdays back upon him in a deluge.  He knew where he was now; he recalled exactly what he would find at the next turn in the river.  A few minutes later he heard the wheezy chug, chug, chug of the old gold dredge at McCoffin’s Bend.  It would be the Betty M., of course, with old Andy Duggan at the windlass, his black pipe in mouth, still scooping up the shifting sands as he had scooped them up for more than twenty years.  He could see Andy sitting at his post, clouded in a halo of tobacco smoke, a red-bearded, shaggy-headed giant of a man whom the town affectionately called the River Pirate.  All his life Andy had spent in digging gold out of the mountains or the river, and like grim death he had hung to the bars above and below McCoffin’s Bend.  Keith smiled as he remembered old Andy’s passion for bacon.  One could always find the perfume of bacon about the Betty M., and when Duggan went to town, there were those who swore they could smell it in his whiskers.

Keith left the river trail now for the old logging road.  In spite of his long fight to steel himself for what Conniston had called the “psychological moment,” he felt himself in the grip of an uncomfortable mental excitement.  At last he was face to face with the great gamble.  In a few hours he would play his one card.  If he won, there was life ahead of him again, if he lost—­death.  The old question which he had struggled to down surged upon him.  Was it worth the chance?  Was it in an hour of madness that he and Conniston had pledged themselves to this amazing adventure?  The forest was still with him.  He could turn back.  The game had not yet gone so far that he could not withdraw his hand—­and for a space a powerful impulse moved him.  And then, coming suddenly to the edge of the clearing at McCoffin’s Bend, he saw the dredge close inshore, and striding up from the beach Andy Duggan himself!  In another moment Keith had stepped forth and was holding up a hand in greeting.