ilence. The knife dropped from Pete's
hand. She had shot with amazing accuracy, straight for the little
hollow in his back that his raised arm had made. He turned with a look
of ghastly surprise.

Then he went on his face, creeping like a legless thing toward the door.
With a mighty effort Bill rolled Harold beneath him.

The battle was short thereafter. Harold had never been a match for
Bill, unaided. The latter's hard fists lashed into his face, blow after
blow with grim reports in the silence. Harold's resistance ceased; his
body quivered and lay still. Remembering Virginia Bill leaped to his
feet.

But Harold was not quite unconscious. But one impulse was left,--to
escape; and dumbly he crawled to the door. Pete had managed to open it;
but he crawled past Pete's body, strangely huddled and still, just
beyond the threshold. Then he paused in the snow for a last, savage
expression of his hate.

But it was just words. No weapon remained in his hands. "I'll get you
yet, you devil!" he screamed, almost incoherently. "I'll lay in wait
and kill you--you can't get away! The wolves have got your grizzly
meat--you can't go without food."

His voice was shrill and terrible in the silence of the winter night.
Even in the stress and inward tumult that was the reaction of the
battle, Bill could not help but hear. He didn't doubt that the words
were true: he realized in an instant what the loss of the grizzly
flesh would mean. But his only wish was that he had killed the
man when he had him helpless in his hands.

He remembered Joe then, and listened for any sound from him. He heard
none, and like a man in a dream he felt his way to the lifeless form
beside the wall. He seized the shoulders of the breed's coat, dragged
him like a sack of straw, and as easily hurled his body through the
doorway into the drifts. Two bodies lay there now. But only the
coyotes, seekers of the dead, had interest in them.

He turned, then stood swaying slightly, in the doorway. No wind stirred
over the desolate wastes without. The cabin was ominously silent. He
could hear his own troubled breathing; but where there was no stir, no
murmur from the corner where he had left Virginia. A ghastly terror,
unknown in the whole stress of the battle, swept over him.

"Virginia," he called. "Where are you?"

From the dark, far end of the cabin he heard the answer,--a voice low
and tremulous such as sometimes heard from the lips