in coming now was to
see how his beavers got on in winter, and to assure himself that Jabe
had been able to protect them.

The morning after his arrival in camp he set out to visit the pond. He
went on snowshoes, of course, and carried his little Winchester as he
always did in the woods, holding tenaciously that the true lover of
peace should be ever prepared for war. The lumbermen had gone off to
work with the first of dawn; and far away to his right he heard the
axes ringing, faintly but crisply, on the biting morning air. For half
a mile he followed a solitary snowshoe trail, which he knew to be
Jabe's by the peculiar broad toe and long, trailing heel which Jabe
affected in snowshoes; and he wondered what his friend was doing in
this direction, so far from the rest of the choppers. Then Jabe's
track swerved off to the left, crossing the brook; and the Boy tramped
on over the unbroken snow.

The sound of the distant choppers soon died away, and he was alone in
the unearthly silence. The sun, not yet risen quite clear of the
hilltops, sent spectral, level, far-reaching gleams of thin
pink-and-saffron light down the alleys of the sheeted trees. The low
crunching of his snowshoes on the crisp snow sounded almost blatant in
the Boy's tensely listening ears. In spite of himself he began to
tread stealthily, as if the sound of his steps might bring some
ghostly enemy upon him from out of the whiteness.

Suddenly the sound of an axe came faintly to his ears from straight
ahead, where he knew no choppers were at work. He stopped short. That
axe was not striking wood. It was striking ice. It was chopping the
ice of Boy's Pond! What could it mean? There were no fish in that pond
to chop the ice for!

As he realized that some one was preparing to trap his beavers his
face flushed with anger, and he started forward at a run. That it was
no one from the camp he knew very well. It must be some strange
trapper who did not know that this pond was under protection. He
thought this out as he ran on; and his anger calmed down. Trappers
were a decent, understanding folk; and a word of explanation would
make things all right. There were plenty of other beaver ponds in that
neighbourhood.

Pressing through the white-draped ranks of the young fir-trees, he
came out suddenly upon the edge of the pond, and halted an instant in
irresolution. Two dark-visaged men--his quick eye knew them for
half-breeds--were busy on the snow about twen