return to the scrub timber again.

That night the last of the blizzard that had raged for days
exhausted itself. For a week clear weather followed. It was
intensely cold, but no snow fell. In that week Philip traveled a
hundred and twenty miles westward.

It was on the eighth night, as he sat near his fire in a thick
clump of dwarf spruce, that the thing happened which Pierre
Breault, with a fatalism born of superstition, knew would come to
pass. And it is curious that on this night, and in the very hour
of the strange happening, Philip had with infinite care and a
great deal of trouble rewoven the fifty hairs back into the form
of the golden snare.





CHAPTER V




The night was so bright that the spruce trees cast vivid shadows
on the snow. Overhead there were a billion stars in a sky as dear
as an open sea, and the Great Dipper shone like a constellation of
tiny suns. The world did not need a moon. At a distance of three
hundred yards Philip could have seen a caribou if it had passed.
He sat close to his fire, with the heat of it reflected from the