making good time. He read that from the tracks
--straight, evenly spaced, no weary heel-dragging. Once or twice, he
saw where they had stopped for a brief rest. He hoped to see their
fire in the evening.

He didn't. They wouldn't have enough fuel to make a big one, or keep
it burning long. But in the morning, as he was breaking camp, he saw
black smoke ahead.

A few times, he had been in air-boats, and had looked down on the back
of the Ice-Father, and it had looked flat. Really, it was not. There
were long ridges, sheer on one side and sloping gently on the other,
where the ice had overridden hills and low mountains, or had cracked
and one side had pushed up over the other. And there were deep gullies
where the prevailing winds had scooped away loose snow year after year
for centuries, and drifts where it had piled, many of them higher than
the building-mounds of the ancient cities. But from a distance, as
from above, they all blended into a featureless white monotony.

At last, leaving a tangle of cliffs and ravines, he looked out across
a broad stretch of nearly level snow and saw, for the first time, the
men he was following. Four tiny dots, so far that they seemed
motionless, strung out in single file. Instantly, he crouched behind a
swell in the surface and dragged Brave down beside him. One of them,
looking back, might see him, as he saw them. When they vanished behind
a snow-hill, he rose and hastened forward, to take cover again. He
kept at this all day; by alternately resting and running, be found
himself gaining on them, and toward evening, he was within
rifle-range. The man in the lead was Vahr Farg's son; even at that
distance he recognized him easily. The others were Southrons, of
course; they wore quilted garments of cloth, and quilted hoods. The
man next to Vahr, in blue, carried a rifle, as Vahr did. The man in
yellow had only an ice-staff, and the man in green, at the rear, had
the Crown on his pack, still in the bearskin bundle.

He waited, at the end of the day, until he saw the light of their
fire. Then he and Brave circled widely around their camp, and stopped
behind a snow-ridge, on the other side of an open and level stretch a
mile wide. He dug the sleeping-hole on the crest of the ridge, making
it larger than usual, and piled up a snow breastwork in front of it,
with an embrasure through which he could look or fire without being
seen.

Before daybreak, he was awake and had his pack made,