e night like day, he would be
an easy victim. Bram could pick him off without showing himself. But it
was his one chance, and he took it.

CHAPTER VI

An hour later Philip looked at his watch. It was close to midnight. In
that hour his nerves had been keyed to a tension that was almost at the
breaking point. Not a sound came from off the Barren or from out of the
scrub timber that did not hold a mental and physical shock for him. He
believed that Bram and his pack would come up quietly; that he would
not hear the man's footsteps or the soft pads of his beasts until they
were very near. Twice a great snow owl fluttered over his head. A third
time it pounced down upon a white hare back in the shrub, and for an
instant Philip thought the time had come. The little white foxes,
curious as children, startled him most. Half a dozen times they sent
through him the sharp thrill of anticipation, and twice they made him
climb his tree.

After that hour the reaction came, and with the steadying of his nerves
and the quieter pulse of his blood Philip began to ask himself if he
was going to escape the ordeal which a short time before he had
accepted as a certainty. Was it possible that his shots had frightened
Bram? He could not believe that. Cowardice was the last thing he would
associate with the strange man he had seen in the starlight. Vividly he
saw Bram's face again. And now, after the almost unbearable strain he
had been under, a mysterious SOMETHING that had been in that face
impinged itself upon him above all other things. Wild and savage as the
face had been, he had seen in it the unutterable pathos of a creature
without hope. In that moment, even as caution held him listening for
the approach of danger, he no longer felt the quickening thrill of man
on the hunt for man. He could not have explained the change in
himself--the swift reaction of thought and emotion that filled him with
a mastering sympathy for Bram Johnson.

He waited, and less and less grew his fear of the wolves. Even more
clearly he saw Bram as the time passed; the hunted look in the man's
eyes, even as he hunted--the loneliness of him as he had stood
listening for a sound from the only friends he had--the padded beasts
ahead. In spite of Bram's shrieking cry to his pack, and the
strangeness of the laugh that had floated back out of the white night
after the shots, Philip was convinced that he was not mad. He had heard
of men whom loneliness ha