a better one somewhere--even if
he is a man-killer like Mr. William DeBar."

He lighted his pipe and went to the door. For the first time in days the
sun was shining in a cold blaze of fire over the southeastern edge of
the barrens, which swept away in a limitless waste of snow-dune and rock
and stunted scrub among which occasional Indian and half-breed trappers
set their dead-falls and poison baits for the northern fox. Sixty
miles to the west was Fort Smith. A hundred miles to the south lay the
Hudson's Bay Company's post at Chippewayan; a hundred and fifty miles
to the south and east was the post at Fond du Lac, and to the
north--nothing. A thousand miles or so up there one would have struck
the polar sea and the Eskimo, and it was with this thought of the
lifelessness and mystery of a dead and empty world that Philip turned
his eyes from the sun into the gray desolation that reached from Pierre
Thoreau's door to the end of the earth. Far off to the north he saw
a black speck moving in the chaos of white. It might have been a fox
coming over a snow-dune a rifle-shot away, for distances are elusive
where the sky and the earth seem to meet in a cold gray rim about one;
or it might have been a musk-ox or a caribou at a greater distance, but
the longer he looked the more convinced he became that it was none of
these--but a man. It moved slowly, disappeared for a few minutes in one
of the dips of the plain, and came into view again much nearer. This
time he made out a man, and behind, a sledge and dogs.

"It's Pierre," he shivered, closing the door and coming back to the
stove. "I wonder what the deuce the breed will say when he finds a
stranger here and his grub half gone."

After a little he heard the shrill creaking of a sledge on the crust
outside and then a man's voice. The sounds stopped close to the cabin
and were followed by a knock at the door.

"Come in!" cried Philip, and in the same breath it flashed upon him that
it could not be the breed, and that it must be a mighty particular and
unusual personage to knock at all.

The door opened and a man came in. He was a little man, and was bundled
in a great beaver overcoat and a huge beaver cap that concealed all
of his face but his eyes, the tip of his nose, and the frozen end of a
beard which stuck out between the laps of his turned-up collar like
a horn. For all the world he looked like a diminutive drum-major, and
Philip rose speechless, his pipe still in hi