titious man.
No, he was not that. He would have staked his life on it. But it was
not pleasant to hear a dead man's name shrieked over one's head by the
wind. Under the cover of his sleeping-bag flap Corporal Blake laughed.
Funny things were always happening, he tried to tell himself. And this
was a mighty good joke. Breault wasn't so slow, after all. He had given
his promise, and he was keeping it; for, if it wasn't really Breault's
voice up there in the wind, multiplied a thousand times, it was a good
imitation of it. Again Corporal Blake laughed--a laugh as unpleasant as
the cough that had come from Breault's bullet-punctured lung. He fell
asleep after a time; but even sleep could not drive from him the
clinging obsession of the thought that strange things were to happen in
this taking of Jan Thoreau.

With the gray dawn there was nothing to mark the passing of the storm
except freshly fallen snow, and Blake was on the trail before it was
light enough to see a hundred yards ahead. There was a defiance and a
contempt of last night in the crack of his long caribou-gut whip and
the halloo of his voice as he urged on his dogs. Breault's voice in the
wind? Bah! Only a fool would have thought that. Therefore he was a
fool. And Jan Thoreau--it would be like taking a child. There would be
no happenings to report--merely an arrest, a quick return journey, an
affair altogether too ordinary to be interesting. Perhaps it was all on
account of the hearty supper of caribou liver he had eaten. He was fond
of liver, and once or twice before it had played him tricks.

He began to wonder if he would find Jan Thoreau at home. He remembered
Jan quite vividly. The Indians called him Kitoochikun because he played
a fiddle. Blake, the Iron Man, disliked him because of that fiddle. Jan
was never without it, on the trail or off. The Fiddling Man, he called
him contemptuously--a baby, a woman; not fit for the big north. Tall
and slim, with blond hair in spite of his French blood and name, a
quiet and unexcitable face, and an air that Blake called "damned
superiority." He wondered how the Fiddling Man had ever screwed up
nerve enough to kill Breault. Undoubtedly there had been no fight. A
quick and treacherous shot, no doubt. That was like a man who played a
fiddle. POOF! He had no more respect for him than if he dressed in
woman's clothing.

And he DID have a wife, this Jan Thoreau. They lived a good twenty
miles off the north-and-south tr