th hot air and smoke. He knew what it
meant to have the lungs "touched"--sloughing away in the spring,
blood-spitting, and certain death.

On the fourth day the temperature began to rise; the fifth it was
clear, and thirty degrees warmer. His thermometer had gone to sixty
below zero. It was now thirty below.

It was the morning of the sixth day when he reached the thick fringe of
stunted spruce that sheltered Peter God's cabin. He was half blinded.
The snow-filled blizzards cut his face until it was swollen and purple.
Twenty paces from Peter God's cabin he stopped, and stared, and rubbed
his eyes--and rubbed them again--as though not quite sure his vision
was not playing him a trick.

A cry broke from his lips then. Over Peter God's door there was nailed
a slender sapling, and at the end of that sapling there floated a
tattered, windbeaten red rag. It was the signal. It was the one voice
common to all the wilderness--a warning to man, woman and child, white
or red, that had come down through the centuries. Peter God was down
with the smallpox!

For a few moments the discovery stunned him. Then he was filled with a
chill, creeping horror. Peter God was sick with the scourge. Perhaps he
was dying. It might be--that he was dead. In spite of the terror of the
thing ahead of him, he thought of Josephine. If Peter God was dead--

Above the low moaning of the wind in the spruce tops he cursed himself.
He had thought a crime, and he clenched his mittened hands as he stared
at the one window of the cabin. His eyes shifted upward. In the air was
a filmy, floating gray. It was smoke coming from the chimney. Peter God
was not dead.

Something kept him from shouting Peter God's name, that the trapper
might come to the door. He went to the window, and looked in. For a few
moments he could see nothing. And then, dimly, he made out the cot
against the wall. And Peter God sat on the cot, hunched forward, his
head in his hands. With a quick breath Philip turned to the door,
opened it, and entered the cabin. Peter God staggered to his feet as
the door opened. His eyes were wild and filled with fever.

"You--Curtis!" he cried huskily. "My God, didn't you see the flag?"

"Yes."

Philip's half-frozen features were smiling, and now he was holding out
a hand from which he had drawn his mitten.

"Lucky I happened along just now, old man. You've got it, eh?"

Peter God shrank back from the other's outstretched hand.

"There's tim