pendable as day and night. They blessed him for
his punctuality, and not one of them missed him when he was gone. A
strange man was Breault.

With his back against a tree, where he had propped himself after the
first shock of the bullet in his lung, he took a last look at life with
a passionless imperturbability. If there was any emotion at all in his
face it was one of vindictiveness--an emotion roused by an intense and
terrible hatred that in this hour saw the fulfilment of its vengeance.
Few men nursed a hatred as Breault had nursed his. And it gave him
strength now, when another man would have died.

He measured the distance between himself and the sledge. It was,
perhaps, a dozen paces. The dogs were still standing, tangled a little
in their traces,--eight of them,--wide-chested, thin at the groins, a
wolfish horde, built for endurance and speed. On the sledge was a
quarter of a ton of his Majesty's mail. Toward this Breault began to
creep slowly and with great pain. A hand inside of him seemed crushing
the fiber of his lung, so that the blood oozed out of his mouth. When
he reached the sledge there were many red patches in the snow behind
him. He opened with considerable difficulty a small dunnage sack, and
after fumbling a bit took there-from a pencil attached to a long red
string, and a soiled envelope.

For the first time a change came upon his countenance--a ghastly smile.
And above his hissing breath, that gushed between his lips with the
sound of air pumped through the fine mesh of a colander, there rose a
still more ghastly croak of exultation and of triumph. Laboriously he
wrote. A few words, and the pencil dropped from his stiffening fingers
into the snow. Around his neck he wore a long red scarf held together
by a big brass pin, and to this pin he fastened securely the envelope.

This much done,--the mystery of his death solved for those who might
some day find him,--the ordinary man would have contented himself by
yielding up life's struggle with as little more physical difficulty as
possible. Breault was not ordinary. He was, in his one way, efficiency
incarnate. He made space for himself on the sledge, and laid himself
out in that space with great care, first taking pains to fasten about
his thighs two babiche thongs that were employed at times to steady his
freight. Then he ran his left arm through one of the loops of the stout
mail-chest. By taking these precautions he was fairly secure in the
b