within him had become positive. And now, as his eyes turned from
the inspection of the sledge to Bram and his wolves, he wondered
where the trail was taking him. Was it possible that Bram was
striking straight north for Coronation Gulf and the Eskimo? He had
noted that the polar bear skin was only slightly worn--that it had
not long been taken from the back of the animal that had worn it.
He recalled what he could remember of his geography. Their course,
if continued in the direction Bram was now heading, would take
them east of the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and they would
hit the Arctic somewhere between Melville Sound and the Coppermine
River. It was a good five hundred miles to the Eskimo settlements
there. Bram and his wolves could make it in ten days, possibly in
eight.

If his guess was correct, and Coronation Gulf was Bram's goal, he
had found at least one possible explanation for the tress of
golden hair.

The girl or woman to whom it had belonged had come into the north
aboard a whaling ship. Probably she was the daughter or the wife
of the master. The ship had been lost in the ice--she had been
saved by the Eskimo--and she was among them now, with other white
men. Philip pictured it all vividly. It was unpleasant--horrible.
The theory of other white men being with her he was conscious of
forcing upon himself to offset the more reasonable supposition
that, as in the case of the golden snare, she belonged to Bram. He
tried to free himself of that thought, but it clung to him with a
tenaciousness that oppressed him with a grim and ugly foreboding.
What a monstrous fate for a woman! He shivered. For a few moments
every instinct in his body fought to assure him that such a thing