was in striking Alex Thumb with the
dog-whip when he refused to pull the outfit in the face of a blizzard.
Thumb's reputation as a "bad Injun" was well founded. The son of a
hot-tempered French trader and a Cree mother, his early life had been a
succession of merciless beatings. At the age of fourteen he killed his
father with a blow from an ice chisel, and thereafter served ten years
of an indeterminate sentence, during the course of which the unmerciful
beatings were administered for each infraction of reformatory rules,
until in his heart was born a sullen hatred of all white men and an
abysmal hatred of the lash. When Wentworth struck, his doom was
sealed, but as Murchison said, Alex Thumb was canny. He had no mind to
serve another term in prison.

All through the spring and summer he trailed the engineer, waiting with
the patience that is the heritage of the wilderness dweller for the
time and the place to strike and avoid suspicion. And as time drew on
the half-breed's hatred against all white men seemed to concentrate
into a mighty rage against this one white man. There had been times
when he could have killed him from afar. More than once on the trail
Wentworth unconsciously stood with the sights of Alex Thumb's rifle
trained upon his head, or his heart. But such was his hatred that
Thumb always stayed the finger that crooked upon the trigger--and bided
his time.

Thus it was that half an hour after Wentworth pushed out into the lake
another canoe shot out from the shore and fell in behind, its lone
occupant, paddling noiselessly, easily kept just within sight of the
fleeing man. When daylight broadened Wentworth landed upon a sandy
point and ate breakfast. Upon another point, a mile to the rear, Alex
Thumb lay on his belly and chewed jerked meat as his smouldering black
eyes regarded gloatingly the man in the distance.

Gods Lake is nearly fifty miles in its north and south reach, and all
day Wentworth paddled southward, holding well to the western shore.

At noon he rested for an hour and ate luncheon, his eyes now and then
scanning the back reach of the lake. But he saw nothing, and from an
aspen thicket scarce half a mile away Alex Thumb watched in silence.

As the afternoon wore to a closer the half-breed drew nearer. The
shadows of the bordering balsams were long on the water when Wentworth
first caught sight of the pursuing canoe. His first thought was that
Orcutt had arrived at the pos