Carefully he examined the abandoned camp. In the hard crust were the imprints of dogs' claws. In several places he found the faint, broad impression made by a toboggan. The marks at least cleared away the mystery of their disappearance. Sometime during the night they had fled by dog-sledge into the North.

He was tired when he returned to the hotel and it was rather with a sense of disappointment than pleasure that he learned the work-train was to leave for Le Pas late that night instead of the next day. After a quiet hour's rest in his room, however, his old enthusiasm returned to him. He found himself feverishly anxious to reach Le Pas and the big camp on the Wekusko. Croisset's warning for him to turn back into the South, instead of deterring him, urged him on. He was born a fighter. It was by fighting that he had forced his way round by round up the ladder of success. And now the fact that his life was in danger, that some mysterious peril awaited him in the depths of the wilderness, but added a new and thrilling fascination to the tremendous task which was ahead of him. He wondered if this same peril had beset Gregson and Thorne, and if it was the cause of their failure, of their anxiety to return to civilization. He a.s.sured himself that he would know when he met them at Le Pas. He would discover more when he became a part of the camp on the Wekusko; that is, if the half-breed's warning held any significance at all, and he believed that it did. Anyway, he would prepare for developments. So he went to a gun-shop, bought a long-barreled six-shooter and a holster, and added to it a hunting-knife like that he had seen carried by Croisset.

It was near midnight when he boarded the work-train and dawn was just beginning to break over the wilderness when it stopped at Etomami, from which point he was to travel by hand-car over the sixty miles of new road that had been constructed as far north as Le Pas. For three days the car had been waiting for the new chief of the road, but neither Gregson nor Thorne was with it.

"Mr. Gregson is waiting for you at Le Pas," said one of the men who had come with it. "Thorne is at Wekusko."

For the first time in his life Howland now plunged into the heart of the wilderness, and as mile after mile slipped behind them and he sped deeper into the peopleless desolation of ice and snow and forest his blood leaped in swift excitement, in the new joy of life which he was finding up here under the far northern skies. Seated on the front of the car, with the four men pumping behind him, he drank in the wild beauties of the forests and swamps through which they slipped, his eyes constantly on the alert for signs of the big game which his companions told him was on all sides of them.

Everywhere about them lay white winter. The rocks, the trees, and the great ridges, which in this north country are called mountains, were covered with four feet of snow and on it the sun shone with dazzling brilliancy. But it was not until a long grade brought them to the top of one of these ridges and Howland looked into the north that he saw the wilderness in all of its grandeur. As the car stopped he sprang to his feet with a joyous cry, his face aflame with what he saw ahead of him.

Stretching away under his eyes, mile after mile, was the vast white desolation that reached to Hudson Bay. In speechless wonder he gazed down on the unblazed forests, saw plains and hills unfold themselves as his vision gained distance, followed a frozen river until it was lost in the bewildering picture, and let his eyes rest here and there on the glistening, snow-smothered bosoms of lakes, rimmed in by walls of black forest. This was not the wilderness as he had expected it to be, nor as he had often read of it in books. It was not the wilderness that Gregson and Thorne had described in their letters. It was beautiful! It was magnificent! His heart throbbed with pleasure as he gazed down on it, the flush grew deeper in his face, and he seemed hardly to breathe in his tense interest.

One of the four on the car was an old Indian and it was he, strangely enough, who broke the silence. He had seen the look in Howland's face, and he spoke softly, close to his ear, "Twent' t'ousand moose down there--twent' t'ousand caribou-oo! No man--no house--more twent'

t'ousand miles!"

Howland, even quivering in his new emotion, looked into the old warrior's eyes, filled with the curious, thrilling gleam of the spirit which was stirring within himself. Then again he stared straight out into the unending distance as though his vision would penetrate far beyond the last of that visible desolation--on and on, even to the grim and uttermost fastnesses of Hudson Bay; and as he looked he knew that in these moments there had been born in him a new spirit, a new being; that no longer was he the old Jack Howland whose world had been confined by office walls and into whose conception of life there had seldom entered things other than those which led directly toward the achievement of his ambitions.

The short northern day was nearing an end when once more they saw the broad Saskatchewan twisting through a plain below them, and on its southern sh.o.r.e the few log buildings of Le Pas hemmed in on three sides by the black forests of balsam and spruce. Lights were burning in the cabins and in the Hudson Bay Post's store when the car was brought to a halt half a hundred paces from a squat, log-built structure, which was more brilliantly illuminated than any of the others.

"That's the hotel," said one of the men. "Gregson's there."

A tall, fur-clad figure hurried forth to meet Howland as he walked briskly across the open. It was Gregson. As the two men gripped hands the young engineer stared at the other in astonishment. This was not the Gregson he had known in the Chicago office, round-faced, full of life, as active as a cricket.

"Never so glad to see any one in my life, Howland!" he cried, shaking the other's hand again and again. "Another month and I'd be dead. Isn't this a h.e.l.l of a country?"

"I'm falling more in love with it at every breath, Gregson. What's the matter? Have you been sick?"

Gregson laughed as they turned toward the lighted building. It was a short, nervous laugh, and with it he gave a curious sidewise glance at his companion's face.

"Sick?--yes, sick of the job! If the old man hadn't sent us relief Thorne and I would have thrown up the whole thing in another four weeks.

I'll warrant you'll get your everlasting fill of log shanties and half-breeds and moose meat and this infernal snow and ice before spring comes. But I don't want to discourage you."

"Can't discourage me!" laughed Howland cheerfully. "You know I never cared much for theaters and girls," he added slyly, giving Gregson a good-natured nudge. "How about 'em up here?"

"Nothing--not a cursed thing." Suddenly his eyes lighted up. "By George, Howland, but I _did_ see the prettiest girl I ever laid my eyes on to-day! I'd give a box of pure Havanas--and we haven't had one for a month!--if I could know who she is!"

They had entered through the low door of the log boarding-house and Gregson was throwing off his heavy coat.

"A tall girl, with a fur hat and m.u.f.f?" queried Howland eagerly.

"Nothing of the sort. She was a typical Northerner if there ever was one--straight as a birch, dressed in fur cap and coat, short caribou skin skirt and moccasins, and with a braid hanging down her back as long as my arm. Lord, but she was pretty!"

"Isn't there a girl somewhere up around our camp named Meleese?" asked Howland casually.

"Never heard of her," said Gregson.

"Or a man named Croisset?"

"Never heard of him."

"The deuce, but you're interesting," laughed the young engineer, sniffing at the odors of cooking supper. "I'm as hungry as a bear!"

From outside there came the sharp cracking of a sledge-driver's whip and Gregson went to one of the small windows looking out upon the clearing.

In another instant he sprang toward the door, crying out to Howland,

"By the G.o.d of love, there she is, old man! Quick, if you want to get a glimpse of her!"

He flung the door open and Howland hurried to his side. There came another crack of the whip, a loud shout, and a sledge drawn by six dogs sped past them into the gathering gloom of the early night.

From Howland's lips, too, there fell a sudden cry; for one of the two faces that were turned toward him for an instant was that of Croisset, and the other--white and staring as he had seen it that first night in Prince Albert--was the face of the beautiful girl who had lured him into the ambush on the Great North Trail!

CHAPTER V

HOWLAND'S MIDNIGHT VISITOR

For a moment after the swift pa.s.sing of the sledge it was on Howland's lips to shout Croisset's name; as he thrust Gregson aside and leaped out into the night he was impelled with a desire to give chase, to overtake in some way the two people who, within the s.p.a.ce of forty-eight hours, had become so mysteriously a.s.sociated with his own life, and who were now escaping him again.

It was Gregson who recalled him to his senses.

"I thought you didn't care for theaters--_and girls_, Howland," he exclaimed banteringly, repeating Howland's words of a few minutes before. "A pretty face affects you a little differently up here, eh?

Well, after you've been in this f.a.g-end of the universe for a month or so you'll learn--"

Howland interrupted him sharply.

"Did you ever see either of them before, Gregson?"

"Never until to-day. But there's hope, old man. Surely we can find some one in the place who knows them. Wouldn't it be jolly good fun if Jack Howland, Esquire, who has never been interested in theaters and girls, should come up into these G.o.d-forsaken regions and develop a case of love at first sight? By the Great North Trail, I tell you it may not be as uninteresting for you as it has been for Thorne and me! If I had only seen her sooner--"

"Shut up!" growled Howland, betraying irritability for the first time.

"Let's go in to supper."

"Good. And I move that we investigate these people while we are smoking our after-supper cigars. It will pa.s.s our time away, at least."

"Your taste is good, Gregson," said Howland, recovering his good-humor as they seated themselves at one of the rough board tables in the dining-room. Inwardly he was convinced it would be best to keep to himself the incidents of the past two days and nights. "It was a beautiful face."

"And the eyes!" added Gregson, his own gleaming with enthusiasm. "She looked at me squarely this afternoon when she and that dark fellow pa.s.sed, and I swear they're the most beautiful eyes I ever saw. And her hair--"

"Do you think that she knew you?" asked Howland quietly.

Gregson hunched his shoulders.

"How the deuce could she know me?"

"Then why did she look at you so 'squarely?' Trying to flirt, do you suppose?"