s rifle, and ran like a madman from the cabin.

XXII

THE BLIZZARD

Garth had no conscious design in running; his muscles merely reacted in
obedience to the grinding tumult in his brain. His eardrums rang with the
fancied sound of Natalie's cries; and his eyeballs were seared with the
picture of her shrinking in the brutal hands of Grylls. As he crashed
through the wood, the little branches whipped his face unmercifully; and
the spiny shoots of the jackpines tore his clothes. He ran full tilt into
unyielding obstacles; and was flung aside, unconscious of the shock.

He instinctively sought the other camp. He found it deserted; the tent
gone; the door of the empty cabin swinging idly in the wind. He came to
a stop then; and his arms dropped to his sides: without knowledge of the
direction they had taken; and without the craft to follow their tracks
in the grass, in his helplessness he hovered on the brink of sheer
madness. He was sharply called back to himself by the sound of a faint
groan from the edge of the cut-bank. A tinge of gray had by this time
been woven into the unrelieved blackness. Running toward the sound, he
found a human form prone in the grass; and he saw it was a woman lying
on her face. Grasping her shoulders, he rolled her over. It was Rina.

A tiny hope sprang in his breast. Here at last was a clue.

"Get up!" he said roughly.

She made no answer. From her limpness, and her cold, moist hands, Garth
apprehended that she was physically sick. Partly raising her, he poured
part of the contents of his flask down her throat. She choked, and
turned her head away.

"Let me be!" she murmured. "Let me die!"

The wildness in Garth's veins subsided. Here he had something tangible
to work upon; and his conscious brain resumed operations; prompting him
at first like a small, strange voice at an immense distance.

"Tell me what happened!" he said hoarsely. "If they have wronged you,
too, help me to find them, and we'll pay them off together!"

"No! I want die!" whispered Rina in a voice as dull and hopeless as the
sound of all-day rain in the grass. "I say I kill myself. He laugh. He
see me tak' bad medicine. He don' care. I fall down. He leave me. I
t'ink I die then. I ver' glad. But I tak' too much; and it only mak' my
stomach sick. Bam-by I try to go to lake and jomp in--but my head go
off!"

In spite of her unwillingness, Garth forced more of the stimulant down
her throat. Presently she was