A sudden flash shot into his face as he
looked hard at Breed. "See here, how would you like to have me go out to
meet them?" he asked. "Sort of a welcoming committee of one, you know.
Before they got here I could casually give 'em to understand what Lac
Bain has been up against during the last two seasons."

Breed's face brightened in an instant.

"That might save us, Steele. Will you do it?"

"With pleasure."

Philip was conscious of an increasing warmth in his face as he bent over
his plate. "You're sure--they're elderly people?" he asked.

"That is what MacVeigh wrote me from Churchill; at least he said the
colonel was an old man."

"And his wife?"

"Has got her nerve," growled Breed irreverently. "It wouldn't be so bad
if it was only the colonel. But an old woman--ugh! What he doesn't think
of she'll remind him of, you can depend on that."

Steele thought of his mother, who looked at things through a magnifying
lorgnette, and laughed a little cheerlessly.

"I'll go out and meet them, anyway," he comforted. "Have Jack fix me up
for the hike in the morning, Breed. I'll start after breakfast."

He was glad when supper was over and he was back in his own cabin
smoking his pipe. It was almost with a feeling of shame that he took
the golden hair from his wallet and held it once more so that it shone
before his eyes in the firelight.

"You're crazy, Phil Steele," he assured himself. "You're an unalloyed
idiot. What the deuce has Colonel Becker's wife got to do with you--even
if she has golden hair and uses cream-tinted paper soaked in hyacinth?
Confound it--there!" and he released the shining hair from his fingers
so that the air currents sent it floating back into the deeper gloom of
the cabin.

It was midnight before he went to bed. He was up with the first cold
gray of dawn. All that day he strode steadily eastward on snowshoes,
over the company's trail to the bay. Two hours before dusk he put up his
light tent, gathered balsam for a bed, and built a fire of dry spruce
against the face of a huge rock in front of his shelter. It was still
light when he wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the balsam,
with his feet stretched out to the reflected heat of the big rock. It
seemed to Steele that there was an unnatural stillness in the air, as
the night thickened beyond the rim of firelight, and, as the gloom grew
still deeper, blotting out his vision in inky blackness, there crept
over him slowly a f