taking both things together, I decided Billy and his wife had taken a
four-horse team into Caraquet for a load. I had meant to borrow one of
his horses to go on to Skunk's Misery,--for this time I intended to ride
there. But with no horse to borrow, there was nothing to do but to ride
my own, and it was toward ten that night when I left him to wait for me
in a spruce thicket, within half a mile of the porcupine burrows that
Skunk's Misery called houses.

As I turned away, the cold bit a hundred times worse for the lack of
snow in the woods, and the bare ground made the pat of my moccasins
sound louder than I liked; but on the other hand I should leave no track
back to my waiting horse, if I had to clear out without getting Hutton.
The thought made me grin, for I had no fear of it.

Hutton would be asleep, judging from the look of things; for as I got
fairly into Skunk's Misery, it lay still as the dead. The winding tracks
through it were deserted; silent between and under the great rocks and
boulders; slippery in the open with droppings from the pine trees that
grew in and on the masses of huddled rocks. The wind rose a little,
too, and soughed in the pine branches, to die wailing among the stones.
It did not strike me as a cheerful wind for a man in Hutton's shoes, for
it covered the light sound of my feet as I went past the hut of the boy
I had nursed and through the maze of tracks his mother had shown me, to
the new log lean-to the Frenchwoman's son had built and never used. But,
as I reached it, I was suddenly not so sure Hutton was there!

The lean-to looked all right. The door was open, just as I had left it.
But, as I crossed the threshold, I knew I was too late, and there was
nobody inside, or in the cave underneath it where men had been when I
slept there. The place had that empty feeling of desertion, or late
occupancy and a cold lair, that even a worse fool than I could not
mistake now. I shut the door on myself without sound, all the same;
snapped my pocket lantern; and stared,--at just what I had known I was
going to find.

There was nothing in the place now but the bare lean-to walls and the
rock they backed on; but twenty men had been living there since I left
it. The black mark of their fire was plain against the rock face; the
log floor was splintered by heavy boots with nails in them--which did
not speak of the moccasined return of the Frenchwoman's son--and in the
place where I had once made a bed