all the other strange tragedies that the wilderness had given up
to him. They had all been Kent's friends, his intimate friends,
with the exception of the girl, whom Inspector Kedsty had borrowed
for the occasion. With the little missioner he had spent many an
evening, exchanging in mutual confidence the strange and
mysterious happenings of the deep forests, and of the great north
beyond the forests. O'Connor's friendship was a friendship bred of
the brotherhood of the trails. It was Kent and O'Connor who had
brought down the two Eskimo murderers from the mouth of the
Mackenzie, and the adventure had taken them fourteen months. Kent
loved O'Connor, with his red face, his red hair, and his big
heart, and to him the most tragic part of it all was that he was
breaking this friendship now.

But it was Inspector Kedsty, commanding N Division, the biggest
and wildest division in all the Northland, that roused in Kent an
unusual emotion, even as he waited for that explosion just over
his heart which the surgeon had told him might occur at any
moment. On his death-bed his mind still worked analytically. And
Kedsty, since the moment he had entered the room, had puzzled
Kent. The commander of N Division was an unusual man. He was
sixty, with iron-gray hair, cold, almost colorless eyes in which
one would search long for a gleam of either mercy or fear, and a
nerve that Kent had never seen even slightly disturbed. It took
such a man, an iron man, to run N Division according to law, for N
Division covered an area of six hundred and twenty thousand square
miles of wildest North America, extending more than two thousand
miles north of the 70th parallel of latitude, with its farthest
limit three and one-half degrees within the Arctic Circle. To
police this area meant upholding the law in a country fourteen