ith
the help of a team, I can tell you, for my own shoulder's bruised to the
bone from the trace. You take it from me, Jan, one man and one husky are
no sort of a team. No, sir, no sort of a team at all. So sit down, my
son, and let me fill a pipe."

Naturally enough, Dick thought he waited as the result of his own
reflections, to see what things the trail Jan had traveled by would
bring forth. But, all the same, he would not have waited but for Jan's
artful insistence on it. Sometimes, but not very often, a dog acquires
such guile in the world of civilization. In the wild it comes easily and
naturally, even to animals having but a tithe of Jan's exceptional
intelligence and wealth of imagination.

Dick Vaughan had not waited long there beside the trail when his ears
and Jan's caught the sound of Jim Willis's voice and the singing of his
whip. Evidently, in the absence of their leader, Jan's team-mates had
not settled down very well to the day's work. In the distance, away back
on the trail, could be heard now and again the howl of a wolf.

Jim Willis showed no surprise when, in response to a wave of Dick's
hand, he drew up his team alongside a R.N.W.M.P. man and his own missing
team-leader. Jim was not much given to showing surprise in the presence
of other men. He nodded his comprehension, as Dick told the story of
Jan's appearance on the previous evening, and of his disappearance, many
months before, from Lambert's Siding in Saskatchewan.

"It's a bit of a miracle that I should find him again--or he find me,
rather--away up here, isn't it?" said Dick.

"Ah! Pretty 'cute sort of a dog, Jan," said the laconic Jim.

He was noting--one cannot tell with what queer twinges, with what
stirrings of the still deeps of his nature--the fact that, while Jan
lolled a friendly tongue at him and waved his stern when Jim spoke, he
yet remained, as though tied, with his head at Sergeant Vaughan's knee.

The two men leaned against Jim's sled and exchanged samples of tobacco
while Dick briefly told the tale of his travels, with his mad charge,
from a lonely silver-mining camp near the Great Slave Lake. It seemed
Dick had had some ground for fearing that he had stumbled upon some
horrible kind of epidemic of madness in the lone land he had been
traversing. At all events, one of the team of seven huskies with which
he started had developed raging madness within a day or so of the
beginning of his journey, and had had to be shot.