sprang to his
feet. With a glance at the paws and a word for each of the whining
puppies whose white tails switched in answer, Jean cracked his whip and
shouted, "Marche!"

Late that night a huge fire burned in the timber of the sheltered mouth
of the Little Salmon. Two men and a dog-team ate ravenously, then slept
like the dead, while over them roared the norther, rocking the spruce
and jack-pine in the river bottom, heaping the drifts high on the Whale
River trail.

In three days of gruelling toil Marcel had got within ninety miles of
his goal--within a day and a half of Whale River had the trail been ice
hard. But now it would be days longer--how many he dared not guess.

Had the weather held for him, four days from the night of his starting
would have seen him home; for on an iced trail, at his call, his great
dogs would have run like wolves at the rallying cry of the pack. As he
drew his stiffened legs from the rabbit-skins to freshen the fire at
dawn, he bit his cracked lips until they bled, at the thought of what
the blizzard had meant to Julie Breton, waiting, waiting for the
dog-team creeping up the East Coast, hobbled and held back by head-wind
and drift.

The dogs had won a long rest and Marcel did not start breaking trail
inland until after daylight. With the sunrise the wind had increased and
the heart-sick Marcel groaned at the strength-sapping floundering in
breast-high drifts which faced his devoted dogs, when he needed them
fresh for the race up the sea-ice of the coast beyond. Before he slept,
he had weighed the toil of ten miles of drift-barred short-cut across
the Cape, against doubling the headland on the ice, but he had decided
that no men or dogs could face the maelstrom of wind and snow which
churned around its bald buttresses; no strength could force its way--no
endurance prevail, against it.

With Marcel in the lead as trail-breaker and the missionary, who took
the punishment without murmur, like the man he was, following the sled,
Fleur led her sons up to their Calvary in the hills.

As they left the valley and reached the open tundra above, they met the
full force of the wind. For an instant men and dogs stopped dead in
their tracks, then with heads down they hurled themselves into the white
fury which had buried the trail beyond all following.

On pushed the desperate Frenchman in the direction of the north coast,
followed by Fleur with her whitened nose at the tails of his snow-sho