n the sled
sufficient food for his journey home but had preferred to face the
"break-up" in his own camp near a fish-lake and relay his meat over on
his back in May. The memories of the winter aroused by the camp on the
Ghost were too grim to attract him to the comfortable shack.

One morning at sunrise, after lashing a pack on Fleur's broad back, he
threw his tump-line over a bag of smoked meat and swinging it to his
shoulders, started over the trail. In the middle of the forenoon he
walked into the clearing on the Ghost and pushing off the head strap of
his line, dropped his load.

Glancing at the cache where he had left the body of Antoine Beaulieu
lashed in canvas with the fur-packs and rifles of the dead men, Marcel
muttered in surprise:

"By Gar! Dat ees strange t'ing!"

The scaffold was empty; the body of Antoine had been removed and not a
vestige remained of the fur-packs and outfits of Jean's partners.
Neither wolverines, lynxes nor bears, had they been able to overcome the
fish-hook barriers guarding the uprights, would have stripped the
platform in such fashion. Searching the soft earth, he found the faint
tracks of moccasins which the recent rain had not obliterated. But down
on the river shore the mud told the story. A canoe had landed there
within a week, for in spite of the rain the deep impress of the feet of
men carrying heavy loads still marked the beach. Since the ice went out
someone who knew that the three men were wintering there, had travelled
up the Ghost from the Whale, but why? They could not have been starving,
for fish could then be had on the Whale for the setting of a net.
Evidently they had buried Antoine and taken the fur-packs, rifles, and
outfits of the two men to Whale River. Marcel searched for a message, in
the phonetic writing employed throughout the north, burned into a blazed
tree, or on a scrap of birch-bark, left in the shack, but found
nothing. The cabin was as he had last seen it. They had thought him,
also, dead somewhere in the "bush" and had left no word, or----Then the
situation opened to him from the angle of view of the Cree visitors.

A camp on the verge of starvation, witnessed by the depleted cache; a
dead man stabbed to the heart, with his rifle and outfit beside him;
also, the rifle and personal belongings, easily identified by his
relatives, of a second man, who, if he were still alive, would have had
them in his possession. Of the third man, who was to winter