. They had not thought greatly of this matter at
first; but now the fear increased with the passing days. Even Neilson
was not wholly exempt from it. It seemed a hideous, deadly thing,
incompatible with life and hope, that they should be plunging deeper,
farther into helplessness and peril.

If mental distress and physical discomfort can constitute vengeance Ben
was already avenged. Now that they were in the hill-lands, out from the
gorge and into a region of yellow beaver meadows lying between gently
sloping hills, their apprehension turned to veritable terror. A blind
man could see how small was their fighting chance against a hidden foe
who had prepared for their coming. The skin twitched and crept when a
twig cracked about their camp at night, and a cold like death crept
over the frame when the thickets crashed under a leaping moose.

Ray found himself regretting, for the first time, that murderous crime
of his of months before. Even riches might not pay for these days of
dread and nights of terror: the recovery of the girl from Ben's arms
could not begin to recompense. Indeed, the girl's memory was
increasingly hard to call up. The mind was kept busy elsewhere.

"We're walking right into a death trap," he told Neilson one morning.
"If he is here, what chance have we got; he'd have weeks to explore the
country and lay an ambush for us. Besides, I believe he's dead. I don't
believe a human being could have got down this far, alive."

Chan too had found himself inclining toward this latter belief; without
Ray's energy and ambition he had less to keep him fronted to the chase.
Neilson, however, was not yet ready to turn back. He too feared Ben's
attack, but already in the twilight of advancing years, he did not
regard physical danger in the same light as these two younger men.
Besides, he was made of different stuff. The safety of his daughter was
the one remaining impulse in his life.

And more and more, in the chill August nights, the talk about the camp
fire took this trend: the folly of pushing on. It was better to turn
back and wait his chances to strike again, Ray argued, than to walk
bald-faced into death. Sometime Ben must return to the claim: a chance
might come to lay him low. Besides, ever it seemed more probable that
the river had claimed him.

One rainy, disagreeable morning, as they camped beside the river near
the mouth of a small creek, affairs reached their crisis. They had
caught and saddled the