ops above her. She found it in every trap-house
they came to--death--_man death_. It grew stronger and stronger, and
she whined, and nipped Kazan's flank. And Kazan went on. Gray Wolf
followed him to the edge of the clearing in which Loti's cabin stood,
and then she sat back on her haunches, raised her blind face to the gray
sky, and gave a long and wailing cry. In that moment the bristles began
to stand up along Kazan's spine. Once, long ago, he had howled before
the tepee of a master who was newly dead, and he settled back on his
haunches, and gave the death-cry with Gray Wolf. He, too, scented it
now. Death was in the cabin, and over the cabin there stood a sapling
pole, and at the end of the pole there fluttered a strip of red cotton
rag--the warning flag of the plague from Athabasca to the bay. This man,
like a hundred other heroes of the North, had run up the warning before
he laid himself down to die. And that same night, in the cold light of
the moon, Kazan and Gray Wolf swung northward into the country of the
Fond du Lac.

There preceded them a messenger from the post on Reindeer Lake, who was
passing up the warning that had come from Nelson House and the country
to the southeast.

"There's smallpox on the Nelson," the messenger informed Williams, at
Fond du Lac, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake. God only
knows what it is doing to the Bay Indians, but we hear it is wiping out
the Chippewas between the Albany and the Churchill." He left the same
day with his winded dogs. "I'm off to carry word to the Reveillon people
to the west," he explained.

Three days later, word came from Churchill that all of the company's
servants and his majesty's subjects west of the bay should prepare
themselves for the coming of the Red Terror. Williams' thin face turned
as white as the paper he held, as he read the words of the Churchill
factor.

"It means dig graves," he said. "That's the only preparation we can
make."

He read the paper aloud to the men at Fond du Lac, and every available
man was detailed to spread the warning throughout the post's territory.
There was a quick harnessing of dogs, and on each sledge that went out
was a roll of red cotton cloth--rolls that were ominous of death, lurid
signals of pestilence and horror, whose touch sent shuddering chills
through the men who were about to scatter them among the forest people.
Kazan and Gray Wolf struck the trail of one of these sledges on the Gray