t down together. The girl heard blows, then a
heavier one, and with an exclamation of triumph Alan stood up. By
chance his hand had come in contact with his fallen pistol. He clicked
the safety down; he was ready to shoot, ready to continue the fight
with a gun.

"Come," he said.

His voice was gasping, strangely unreal and thick. She came to him and
put her hand in his again, and it was wet and sticky with tundra mud
from the spring. Then they climbed to the swell of the plain, away from
the pool and the willows.

In the air about them, creeping up from the outer darkness of the
strange twilight, were clearer whispers now, and with these sounds of
storm, borne from the west, came a hallooing voice. It was answered from
straight ahead. Alan held the muddied little hand closer in his own and
set out for the range-houses, from which direction the last voice had
come. He knew what was happening. Graham's men were cleverer than he had
supposed; they had encircled the tundra side of the range, and some of
them were closing in on the willow pool, from which the triumphant shout
of the bearded man's companion had come. They were wondering why the
call was not repeated, and were hallooing.

Every nerve in Alan's body was concentrated for swift and terrible
action, for the desperateness of their situation had surged upon him
like a breath of fire, unbelievable, and yet true. Back at the willows
they would have killed him. The hands at his throat had sought his
life. Wolves and not men were about them on the plain; wolves headed by
two monsters of the human pack, Graham and Rossland. Murder and lust and
mad passion were hidden in the darkness; law and order and civilization
were hundreds of miles away. If Graham won, only the unmapped tundras
would remember this night, as the deep, dark kloof remembered in its
gloom the other tragedy of more than half a century ago. And the girl at
his side, already disheveled and muddied by their hands--

His mind could go no farther, and angry protest broke in a low cry from
his lips. The girl thought it was because of the shadows that loomed up
suddenly in their path. There were two of them, and she, too, cried out
as voices commanded them to stop. Alan caught a swift up-movement of an
arm, but his own was quicker. Three spurts of flame darted in lightning
flashes from his pistol, and the man who had raised his arm crumpled to
the earth, while the other dissolved swiftly into the storm-gl