akly.

But it didn't. Instead it narrowed. And as they ascended the slope it
became more and more precipitous. The storm was now beating up,
seemingly from every direction, and it was with difficulty that the
five great huskies hauled their burden in the face of it. However,
Rainy-Moon urged them to their task with no light hand, and just as
the storm settled down to its work in right good earnest they drew up
abreast of a small dugout. The path had narrowed down to barely six
feet in width, bordered on the left hand by a sharp slope upwards
towards the pinewood belt above, and on the right by a sheer
precipice; whilst fifty feet further on there was no more path--just
space. As this became apparent to him, Robb Chillingwood could not
help wondering what their fate might have been had the storm overtaken
them earlier, and they had not come upon the dugout. However, he had
no time for much speculation on the subject, for, as the dogs came to
a stand, the door of the dugout was thrown back and a tall,
cadaverous-looking man stood framed in the opening.

"Kind o' struck it lucky," he observed, without any great show of
enthusiasm. "Come right in. The neche can take the dogs round the side
there," pointing to the left of the dugout. "There's a weatherproof
shack there where I keep my kindling. Guess he can fix up in that till
this d----d breeze has blown itself out. You've missed the trail, I
take it. Come right in."

Half-an-hour later the two Customs officers were seated with their
host round the camp-stove which stood hissing and spluttering in the
centre of the hut. The dogs and Rainy-Moon were housed in the
woodshed.

Now that the travellers were divested of their heavy furs, their
appearance was less picturesque but more presentable. Robb Chillingwood
was about twenty-five; his whole countenance indexed a sturdy honesty
of thought and a merry disposition. There was considerable strength too
about brow and jaw. Leslie Grey was shorter than his companion. A
man of dapper, sturdy figure, and with a face good-looking,
obstinate, and displaying as much sense of humour as a barbed-wire
fence post. He was fully thirty years of age.

Their host possessed a long, attenuated, but powerful figure, and a
face chiefly remarkable for its cadaverous hollows and a pair of
hungry eyes and a dark chin-whisker.

"Yes, sir," this individual was saying, "she's goin' to howl good and
hard for the next forty-eight hours, or I don't