an that I
can spare from the post. There's LeCroix, ten miles to the west. If you
can wait until to-morrow--"

"I must follow this afternoon--now," interrupted Philip. "They will have
left a clean trail behind, and I can overtake them some time to-morrow.
Will you have the team made ready for me--a light sledge, it you've got
it."

By three o'clock he was on the trail again. Breed had spoken truthfully
when he said that his dogs were scrubs. There were four of them, two
mongrels, one blind huskie, and a mamelute that ran lame. And besides
this handicap, Philip found that his own endurance was fast reaching the
ebbing point. He had traveled sixty miles in a day and a half, and his
legs and back began to show signs of the strain. In spite of this fact,
his spirits rose with every mile he placed behind him. He knew that it
would be impossible for Isobel and her father to stand the hardship of
fast and continued travel. At the most they would not make more than
twenty miles in a day, and even with his scrub team he could make
thirty, and would probably overtake them at the end of the next day. And
then it occurred to him, with a pleasurable thrill, that to find Isobel
again on the trail, as he had first seen her, would be a hundred times
better than finding her at Lac Bain. He would accompany her and the
colonel to Churchill. They would be together for days, and at the end of
that time--

He laughed low and joyously, and for a spell he urged the dogs into a
swifter pace. That he had correctly estimated the speed of those ahead
of him he was convinced, when, two hours later, he came upon the remains
of their mid-day camp-fire, nine or ten miles from Lac Bain. It was dark
when he reached this point. There were glowing embers still in the
fire, and these he stirred into life, adding armfuls of dry wood to the
flames. About him in the snow he found the prints of Isobel's little
feet, and in the flood of joy and hope that was sweeping more and more
into his life he sang and whistled, and forgot that he was alone in
a desolation of blackness that made even the dogs slink nearer to the
fire. He would camp here--where Isobel had been only a few hours before.
If he traveled hard he would overtake them by the next noon.

But he had underestimated his own exhaustion. After he had put up his
tent before the fire he made himself a bed of balsam boughs and tell
into a deep sleep, from which neither dawn nor the restless movements of