fire,
Philip began to prepare. He cooked food for six days. Three days he
would follow Bram out into that unmapped and treeless space--the Great
Barren. Beyond that it would be impossible to go without dogs or
sledge. Three days out, and three days back--and even at that he would
be playing a thrilling game with death. In the heart of the Barren a
menace greater than Bram and his wolves would be impending. It was
storm.

His heart sank a little as he set out straight north, marking the
direction by the point of his compass. It was a gray and sunless day.
Beyond him for a distance the Barren was a white plain, and this plain
seemed always to be merging not very far ahead into the purple haze of
the sky. At the end of an hour he was in the center of a vast
amphitheater which was filled with the gloom and the stillness of
death. Behind him the thin fringe of the forest had disappeared. The
rim of the sky was like a leaden thing, widening only as he advanced.
Under that sky, and imprisoned within its circular walls, he knew that
men had gone mad; he felt already the crushing oppression of an
appalling loneliness, and for another hour he fought an almost
irresistible desire to turn back. Not a rock or a shrub rose to break
the monotony, and over his head--so low that at times it seemed as
though he might have flung a stone up to them--dark clouds rolled
sullenly from out of the north and east.

Half a dozen times in those first two hours he looked at his compass.
Not once in that time did Bram diverge from his steady course into the
north. In the gray gloom, without a stone or a tree to mark his way,
his sense of orientation was directing him as infallibly as the
sensitive needle of the instrument which Philip carried.

It was in the third hour, seven or eight miles from the scene of
slaughter, that Philip came upon the first stopping place of the
sledge. The wolves had not broken their traveling rank, and for this
reason he guessed that Bram had paused only long enough to put on his
snowshoes. After this Philip could measure quite accurately the speed
of the outlaw and his pack. Bram's snow-shoe strides were from twelve
to sixteen inches longer than his own, and there was little doubt that
Bram was traveling six miles to his four.

It was one o'clock when Philip stopped to eat his dinner. He figured
that he was fifteen miles from the timber-line. As he ate there pressed
upon him more and more persistently the feeling