ystified, Marcel called: "Marche, Fleur! Marche!" fearing to find,
when she rose, that his rock and anchor had suddenly broken on the
trail.

But the great dog, ignoring the command, raised her nose in a low growl
as Marcel reached her.

"What troubles you, Fleur?" he asked, on his knees beside her, brushing
the crusted snow from her ears and slant eyes. Again Fleur whined
mysteriously.

"Where ees de pain, Fleur? Get up!" he ordered sharply, thinking to
learn where her iron body had received its hurt. But the dog lay rigid,
her throat still rumbling.

"By Gar, dis ees queer t'ing!" muttered Marcel, his mittened hand on the
massive head.

Then some strange impulse led him to advance into the black wall, when,
with fierce protest, Fleur, jerking Jules to his feet, leaped forward,
straining to reach him.

The Frenchman, checked by the dog's action, stared into the darkness,
until, at length, he saw that the white tundra at his feet fell away
before his snow-shoes and he looked out into gray space.

As he crouched peering ahead, his senses slowly warned him that he stood
on a shoulder of cliff falling sheer to the invisible beach below.

He had driven his dogs to the lip of a ghastly death; and Julie----

Turning back, he flung himself beside the trembling Fleur and with his
arm circling the great neck, kissed the battered nose. Fleur, with the
uncanny instinct of the born lead-dog, had scented the open space,
divined the danger, had known--and lain down, saving them all.

Swinging his team off the brow of the cliff, he worked back and finally
down to the beach, and his muffled passenger, drowsy, with swiftly
numbing limbs, never knew that he had ridden calmly, that night, out to
the doors of doom.

In the lee of an island Marcel made camp and boiled life-giving
tea,--the panacea of the north--and pemmican, on a hot fire, which soon
revived the frozen Hunter.

To his joy, he realized that the back of the blizzard was broken, for as
the wind and snow eased, the temperature rapidly fell to an Arctic cold.
With Whale River eighty miles away; his dogs broken by lack of rest and
stiff from the wrenching and exhaustion of the battle with the deep
snow; his own legs twinging with "mal raquette"; Marcel thanked God, for
the dawn would see the wind dead and if his team did not fail him, in
two days he would reach the post.

CHAPTER XL

"HE'S GOT HIS MAN!"

Whale River was astir. Before the trade-house gr