k was the silence of death, broken only faintly by the last gasping
throes of the animals that lay dying in the snow.

In the trees there sounded the metallic clink of loading shells.

Wabi spoke first.

"I believe we did a good job, Mukoki!"

Mukoki's reply was to slip down his tree. The others followed, and
hastened across to the rock. Five bodies lay motionless in the snow. A
sixth was dragging himself around the side of the rock, and Mukoki
attacked it with his belt-ax. Still a seventh had run for a dozen rods,
leaving a crimson trail behind, and when Wabi and Rod came up to it the
animal was convulsed in its last dying struggles.

"Seven!" exclaimed the Indian youth. "That is one of the best shoots we
ever had. A hundred and five dollars in a night isn't bad, is it?"

The two came back to the rock, dragging the wolf with them. Mukoki was
standing as rigid as a statue in the moonlight, his face turned into the
north. He pointed one arm far out over the plains, and said, without
turning his head,

"See!"

Far out in that silent desolation the hunters saw a lurid flash of
flame. It climbed up and up, until it filled the night above it with a
dull glow--a single unbroken stream of fire that rose far above the
swamps and forests of the plains.

"That's a burning jackpine!" said Wabigoon.

"Burning jackpine!" agreed the old warrior. Then he added, "Woonga
signal fire!"

CHAPTER X

RODERICK EXPLORES THE CHASM

To Rod the blazing pine seemed to be but a short distance away--a mile,
perhaps a little more. In the silence of the two Indians as they
contemplated the strange fire he read an ominous meaning. In Mukoki's
eyes was a dull sullen glare, not unlike that which fills the orbs of a
wild beast in a moment of deadly anger. Wabi's face was filled with an
eager flush, and three times, Rod observed, he turned eyes strangely
burning with some unnatural passion upon Mukoki.

Slowly, even as the instincts of his race had aroused the latent,
brutish love of slaughter and the chase in the tamed wolf, the long
smothered instincts of these human children of the forest began to
betray themselves in their bronzed countenances. Rod watched, and he was
thrilled to the soul. Back at the old cabin they had declared war upon
the Woongas. Both Mukoki and Wabigoon had slipped the leashes that had
long restrained them from meting first vengeance upon their enemies. Now
the opportunity had come. For five minutes the gr