and hills, and through that open
window he caught the sweet scents that came with a soft wind from out
of the forests he had loved for so many years.

"They've been my best friends," he had said to Cardigan, "and when this
nice little thing you're promising happens to me, old man, I want to go
with my eyes on them."

So his cot was close to the window.

Nearest to him sat Cardigan. In his face, more than in any of the
others, was disbelief. Kedsty, Inspector of the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, in charge of N Division during an indefinite leave of absence
of the superintendent, was paler even than the girl whose nervous
fingers were swiftly putting upon paper every word that was spoken by
those in the room. O'Connor, staff-sergeant, was like one struck dumb.
The little, smooth-faced Catholic missioner whose presence as a witness
Kent had requested, sat with his thin fingers tightly interlaced,
silently placing this among all the other strange tragedies that the
wilderness had given up to him. They had all been Kent's friends, his
intimate friends, with the exception of the girl, whom Inspector Kedsty
had borrowed for the occasion. With the little missioner he had spent
many an evening, exchanging in mutual confidence the strange and
mysterious happenings of the deep forests, and of the great north
beyond the forests. O'Connor's friendship was a friendship bred of the
brotherhood of the trails. It was Kent and O'Connor who had brought
down the two Eskimo murderers from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and the
adventure had taken them fourteen months. Kent loved O'Connor, with his
red face, his red hair, and his big heart, and to him the most tragic
part of it all was that he was breaking this friendship now.

But it was Inspector Kedsty, commanding N Division, the biggest and
wildest division in all the Northland, that roused in Kent an unusual
emotion, even as he waited for that explosion just over his heart which
the surgeon had told him might occur at any moment. On his death-bed
his mind still worked analytically. And Kedsty, since the moment he had
entered the room, had puzzled Kent. The commander of N Division was an
unusual man. He was sixty, with iron-gray hair, cold, almost colorless
eyes in which one would search long for a gleam of either mercy or
fear, and a nerve that Kent had never seen even slightly disturbed. It
took such a man, an iron man, to run N Division according to law, for N
Division covered an