He stopped to build a fire of scrub bush and eat his supper on the
edge of the Barren just as the cold stars began blazing over his head.
It was a white, still night. The southern timberline lay far behind
him, and to the north there was no timber for three hundred miles.
Between those lines there was no life, and so there was no sound. On
the west the Barren thrust itself down in a long finger ten miles in
width, and across that MacVeigh would have to strike to reach the
wooded country beyond. It was over there that he had the greatest hope
of discovering a trail. After he had finished his supper he loaded his
pipe, and sat hunched close up to his fire, staring out over the
Barren. For some reason he was filled with a strange and uncomfortable
emotion, and he wished that he had brought along one of his tired dogs
to keep him company.

He was accustomed to loneliness; he had laughed in the face of things
that had driven other men mad. But to-night there seemed to be
something about him that he had never known before, something that
wormed its way deep down into his soul and made his pulse beat faster.
He thought of Pelliter on his fever bed, of Scottie Deane, and then of
himself. After all, was there much to choose between the three of
them?

A picture rose slowly before him in the bush-fire, and in that picture
he saw Scottie, the man-hunted man, fighting a great fight to keep
himself from being hung by the neck until he was dead; and then he saw
Pelliter, dying of the sickness which comes of loneliness, and beyond
those two, like a pale cameo appearing for a moment out of gloom, he
saw the picture of a face. It was a girl's face, and it was gone in an
instant. He had hoped against hope that she would write to him again.