three--Mukoki, Wabigoon and he--would have set out on their romantic
quest for the lost gold-mine that had been revealed to them by the
ancient skeletons in the old cabin. Even as these visions were glowing
in his brain there had come the interruption, the signal shots on the
lake, the return of the dog mail, and now this race to save the life
of Minnetaki!

In his eagerness he ran ahead of the sledge and urged Mukoki into a
faster pace. Every ten minutes the one who rode exchanged place with
one of the runners, so that there were intervals of rest for each two
times an hour. Quickly the red glow over the southwestern forests
faded away; the gloom grew thicker; far ahead, like an endless sheet
losing itself in a distant smother of blackness, stretched the ice and
snow of Lake Nipigon. There was no tree, no rock for guidance over
the trackless waste, yet never for an instant did Mukoki or Wabigoon
falter. The stars began burning brilliantly in the sky; far away the
red edge of the moon rose over this world of ice and snow and forest,
throbbing and palpitating like a bursting ball of fire, as one sees it
now and then in the glory of the great northern night.

Tirelessly, mile after mile, hour after hour, broken only by the
short intervals of rest on the sledge, continued the race across Lake
Nipigon. The moon rose higher; the blood in it paled to the crimson
glow of the moose flower, and silvered as it climbed into the sky,
until the orb hung like a great golden-white disk. In the splendor of
it the solitude of ice and snow glistened without end. There was no
sound but the slipping of the sledge, the pattering of the dogs'
moccasined feet, and now and then a few breathless words spoken by Rod
or his companions. It was a little after eight o'clock by Rod's watch
when there came a change in the appearance of the lake ahead of them.