d gone on to another
region. But if they posted one letter they would post others, and he
felt now that communication had been established. True, the chain
connecting them was long, but it could be shortened inch by inch.

He made a series of widening circles about the tree, looking for the
second paragraph of the letter, and he found it about a hundred yards to
the eastward, exactly like the first, four parallel slashes of a
tomahawk, eye-high, deep into the trunk of a stalwart oak. He found a
third paragraph precisely like the first and the second, a hundred yards
farther on, and then no more. But three were enough. They indicated
clearly the course of the four which was into the northeast. In the
morning he would change his own direction to conform with theirs.

The letter gave him a great surge of the heart, but the night came down
quickly, dark and cold, the bitter wind blew again, and the ice fell
about him in a rain of chill crystals. He knew that the temperature was
falling fast, and that it would be his hardest night so far. He must
have a fire, risk or no risk, and it was a full three hours before he
was able to coax one from dead wood that he dragged from sheltered
recesses. Then it felt so good that he built a second, intending to
sleep between them. His supply of food was low, but knowing how needful
it was to preserve his strength and the full fresh flow of his blood, he
ate of it heartily, and, then when the ground, wet between the fires
from the melted ice, had been dried by the heat, he made his bed and
slept well, although he awoke once in the night and finding the cold
intense put fresh wood on the fires.

The next morning was one of the coldest he had felt, and he was
reluctant to leave the beds of coals, but his comrades had given him a
sign, and he would not dream of ignoring it. He threw ice upon the
fires, and with a sigh felt their heat disappear. Then he followed the
trail to the northeast, hunting at intervals for a renewal of the sign
lest he go wrong. Three times he found it, always the four cuts,
eye-high, always in the trunk of a stalwart oak, and always they led in
the direction in which he was going. The cuts were very deep, and he was
quite sure that they had been made by Shif'less Sol, who added to
remarkable strength wonderful cunning and mastery in the use of a
tomahawk.

About noon, he came to a vast, shallow, flooded area, a third of a mile
or more across, but extending farther