yet. Perhaps she would have to rely upon a course other
than a direct appeal for aid. Now her keen eyes could see the whole
camp: the three seated figures of the men, their rifles leaning near
them, their supplies spread out about the fire.

At one side, quite to the edge of the firelight, she saw a kyack--one of
those square boxes that are hung on a pack saddle--which seemed to be
heaped with jerked caribou or moose flesh. For the time of a breath she
could not take her eyes from it. It was food--food in plenty to sustain
Ben through his illness and the remaining weeks of their exile--and her
eyes moistened and her hands trembled at the sight. She had been taught
the meaning of famine, these last, bitter days. In reality she was now
in the first stage of starvation, experiencing the first, vague
hallucinations, the sense of incorporeality, the ever-declining
strength, the constant yearning that is nothing but the vitals'
submerged demand for food. The contents of the kyack meant _life_ to
herself and to Ben,--deliverance and safety when all seemed lost.

A daughter of the cities far to the south--even a child of
poverty--rarely could have understood the unutterable craving that
overswept her at the sight of this simple food. It was unadorned,
unaccompanied by the delicacies that most human beings have come to look
upon as essentials and to expect with every meal: it was only animal
flesh dried in the smoke and the sun. It not only attracted her
physically; but in that moment it possessed real objective beauty for
her; as it would have possessed for the most cultivated esthete that
might be standing in her place. This girl was down to the most stern
realities, and life and death hung in the balance.

She went on her hands and knees, creeping nearer. Still she did not make
the slightest false motion, creeping with an uncanny silence in the
under shrubbery. And now the words came plain.

"But we must be near," Chan was saying. "They can't be more than a mile
or so from here. We'll find 'em in the morning--"

"If he doesn't find us first and shoot up our camp," Ray replied. "I
wish we'd built our fire further into the woods. Here we've looked all
day without even finding a track except those tracks in the mud."

"They might be beyond the marsh," Neilson suggested.

"But Chan went over that way and didn't find a trace," Ray objected.
"But just the same--we'll make a real search to-morrow. I believe we'll
find the de