ures of the landscape became
more rugged and solemn, and at last they paused at a place which the
Indian called Misty Mountain, and where, disappearing for an hour, he
returned with a team of Eskimo dogs, keen, quick-tempered, and enduring.
They had all now recovered from the disturbing sentiments of the first
portion of the journey; life was at full tide; the spirit of the hunter
was on them.

At length one night they camped in a vast pine grove wrapped in
coverlets of snow and silent as death. Here again Pierre became moody
and alert and took no part in the careless chat at the camp-fire led
by Shon McGann. The man brooded and looked mysterious. Mystery was
not pleasing to Trafford. He had his own secrets, but in the ordinary
affairs of life he preferred simplicity. In one of the silences that
fell between Shon's attempts to give hilarity to the occasion, there
came a rumbling far-off sound, a sound that increased in volume till the
earth beneath them responded gently to the vibration. Trafford looked up
inquiringly at Pierre, and then at the Indian, who, after a moment, said
slowly: "Above us are the hills of the Mighty Men, beneath us is the
White Valley. It is the tramp of buffalo that we hear. A storm is
coming, and they go to shelter in the mountains."

The information had come somewhat suddenly, and McGann was the first to
recover from the pleasant shock: "It's divil a wink of sleep I'll get
this night, with the thought of them below there ripe for slaughter, and
the tumble of fight in their beards."

Pierre, with a meaning glance from his half-closed eyes, added: "But it
is the old saying of the prairies that you do not shout dinner till you
have your knife in the loaf. Your knife is not yet in the loaf, Shon
McGann."

The boom of the trampling ceased, and now there was a stirring in the
snow-clad tree tops, and a sound as if all the birds of the North were
flying overhead. The weather began to moan and the boles of the pines to
quake. And then there came war,--a trouble out of the north, a wave of
the breath of God to show inconsequent man that he who seeks to live by
slaughter hath slaughter for his master.

They hung over the fire while the forest cracked round them, and
the flame smarted with the flying snow. And now the trees, as if the
elements were closing in on them, began to break close by, and one
lurched forward towards them. Trafford, to avoid its stroke, stepped
quickly aside right into the l