a drink, and when he began to climb back found that he had wrenched his
knee. Some movements were not painful, but when his weight came upon
the joint it hurt. He must get up, for all that, and reached the top,
where he sat down with his lips firmly set, and after putting on the
coat felt in the pocket for a cigarette.

The case he took out was not his, and he remembered that he was wearing
another man's coat. The cigarettes were of Turkish tobacco, which is
not much used in Canada, and he thought the quality remarkably good.
This seemed to imply that their owner had a cultivated taste, and
Foster began to wonder whether he was after all not a business man
running away from his creditors, but rejected the theory. It was
strange that although the cigarettes were expensive the case was of the
kind sold in Western stores for fifty cents, but Foster presently gave
up speculating about the man.

The moon was getting low and ragged pine branches cut against the
light. The track was wrapped in shadow that was only a little less
dense than the gloom of the surrounding bush. It was not really cold
for North Ontario, but the fur coat was hardly enough protection to
make a bed in the open air comfortable. Foster had slept in the
Athabasca forests when the thermometer marked forty degrees below zero,
but he then wore different clothes and had been able to make a roaring
fire and build a snow-bank between him and the wind. Moreover, he was
still liable to be overtaken by the men on the train.

Getting up, he found his knee sore and stiff, but limped on for an hour
or two after the moon sank. He seemed to be stumbling along the bottom
of a dark trench, for the firs shut him in like a wall and there was
only an elusive glimmer of light above their serrated tops. He did not