At noon he halted and built a small fire between two rocks, over which
he boiled some tea and warmed his meat. Each day he had built three
fires, but at the end of this day, when darkness stopped him again, it
occurred to him that since that morning DeBar had built but one. Gray
dawn had scarcely broken when he again took up the pursuit. It was
bitterly cold, and a biting wind swept down across the barrens from the
Arctic icebergs. His pocket thermometer registered sixty degrees below
zero when he left it open on the sledge, and six times between dawn and
dusk he built himself fires. Again DeBar built but one, and this time he
found no bannock crumbs.

For the last twenty miles DeBar had gone straight into the North. He
continued straight into the North the next day and several times Philip
scrutinized his map, which told him in that direction there lay nothing
but peopleless barrens as far as the Great Slave.

There was growing in him now a fear--a fear that DeBar would beat him
out in the race. His limbs began to ache with a strange pain and his
progress was becoming slower. At intervals he stopped to rest, and after
each of these intervals the pain seemed to gnaw deeper at his bones,
forcing him to limp, as the dogs were limping behind him. He had felt
it once before, beyond Lac Bain, and knew what it meant. His legs were
giving out--and DeBar would beat him yet! The thought stirred him on,
and before he stopped again he came to the edge of a little lake. DeBar
had started to cross the lake, and then, changing his mind, had turned
back and skirted the edge of it. Philip followed the outlaw's trail
with his eyes and saw that he could strike it again and save distance by
crossing the snow-covered ice.

He went on, with dogs and sledge at his heels, unconscious of the
warning underfoot that had turned DeBar back. In midlake he turned to
urge the dogs into a faster pace, and it was then that he heard under
him a hollow, trembling sound, growing in volume even as he hesitated,
until it surged in under his feet from every shore, like the rolling
thunder of a ten-pin ball. With a loud cry to the dogs he darted
forward, but it was too late. Behind him the ice crashed like brittle
glass, and he saw sledge and dogs disappear as if into an abyss. In an
instant he had begun a mad race to the shore a hundred feet ahead of
him. Ten paces more and he would have reached it, when the toe of his
snow-shoe caught in a hummock of sno