MacNair's brain! Carefully
sealing the tunnel, the young man headed for Fort Norman; and never did
Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack face such a trail. Down the raging
torrent of the Coppermine, across the long portage to the Dismal Lakes,
and then by portage and river to Dease Bay, across the two hundred
miles of Great Bear Lake, and down the Bear River to their destination.

Seven hundred long miles they covered, at a man-killing pace that
brought them into the fort, hollow-eyed and gaunt, and with their
bodies swollen and raw from the sting of black flies and mosquitoes
that swarmed through the holes in their tattered garments.

The men wolfed down the food that was set before them by an Indian
woman, and then, while Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack slept, the
chief trader led Bob MacNair to the grave of his father.

"'Twas his heart, lad, or somethin' busted inside him," explained the
old man. "After supper it was, two weeks agone. He was sittin' i' his
chair wi' his book an' his pipe, an' me in anither beside him. He gi'
a deep sigh, like, an' his book fell to the ground and his pipe. When
I got to him his head was leant back ag'in his chair--and he was dead."

Bob MacNair nodded, and the chief trader returned to the store, leaving
the young man standing silent beside the fresh-turned mound with its
rudely fashioned wooden cross, that stood among the other grass-grown
mounds whose wooden crosses, with their burned inscriptions, were
weather-grey and old. For a long time he stood beside the little
crosses that lent a solemn dignity to the rugged heights of Fort Norman.

It cannot be said that Bob MacNair had loved his father, in the
generally accepted sense of the word. But he had admired and respected
him above all other men, and his first thought upon the discovery of
the lost mine was to vindicate his course in the eyes of this stern,
just man who had so strongly advised against it.

For the opinion of others he cared not the snap of his fingers. But,
to read approval in the deep-set eyes of his father, and to hear the
deep, rich voice of him raised, at last, in approbation, rather than
reproach, he had defied death and pushed himself and his Indians to the
limit of human endurance. And he had arrived too late. The bitterness
of the young man's soul found expression only in a hardening of the jaw
and a clenching of the mighty fists. For, in the heart of him, he knew
that in the future, no matter