ooked at the forest
and saw it with new eyes. The gleam of the slowly moving river held a
meaning for him that it had never held before. Doctor Cardigan, seeing
him then, would have sworn the fever had returned. His eyes held a
slumbering fire. His face was flushed. In these moments Kent did not
see death. He was not visioning the iron bars of a prison. His blood
pulsed only to the stir of that greatest of all adventures which lay
ahead of him. He, the best man-hunter in two thousand miles of
wilderness, would beat the hunters themselves. The hound had turned
fox, and that fox knew the tricks of both the hunter and the hunted. He
would win! A world beckoned to him, and he would reach the heart of
that world. Already there began to flash through his mind memory of the
places where he could find safety and freedom for all time. No man in
all the Northland knew its out-of-the-way corners better than he--its
unmapped and unexplored places, the far and mysterious patches of terra
incognita, where the sun still rose and set without permission of the
Law, and God laughed as in the days when prehistoric monsters fed from
the tops of trees no taller than themselves. Once through that window,
with the strength to travel, and the Law might seek him for a hundred
years without profit to itself.

It was not bravado in his blood that stirred these thoughts. It was not
panic or an unsound excitement. He was measuring things even as he
visioned them. He would go down-river way, toward the Arctic. And he
would find Marette Radisson! Yes, even though she lived at Barracks at
Fort Simpson, he would find her! And after that? The question blurred
all other questions in his mind. There were many answers to it.

Knowing that it would be fatal to his scheme if he were found on his
feet, he returned to his bed. The flush of his exertion and excitement
was still in his face when Doctor Cardigan came half an hour later.

Within the next few minutes he put Cardigan more at his ease than he
had been during the preceding day and night. It was, after all, an
error which made him happier the more he thought about it, he told the
surgeon. He admitted that at first the discovery that he was going to
live had horrified him. But now the whole thing bore a different aspect
for him. As soon as he was sufficiently strong, he would begin
gathering the evidences for his alibi, and he was confident of proving
himself innocent of John Barkley's murder.

He a