all that was coming to him from out
of the night became his master, and he gnawed the babiche in two. It
was the call of the Woman--of Nanette and the baby.

In his freedom Miki sniffed at the edge of Challoner's tent. His back
sagged. His tail drooped. He knew that in this hour he was betraying
the master for whom he had waited so long, and who had lived so vividly
in his dreams. It was not reasoning, but an instinctive oppression of
fact. He would come back. That conviction burned dully in his brain.
But now--to-night--he must go. He slunk off into the darkness. With the
stealth of a fox he made his way between the sleeping dogs. Not until
he was a quarter of a mile from the camp did he straighten out, and
then a gray and fleeting shadow he sped westward under the light of the
moon.

There was no hesitation in the manner of his going. Free of the pain of
his wounds, strong-limbed, deep-lunged as the strongest wolf of the
forests, he went on tirelessly. Rabbits bobbing out of his path did not
make him pause; even the strong scent of a fisher-cat almost under his
nose did not swerve him a foot from his trail. Through swamp and deep
forest, over lake and stream, across open barren and charred burns his
unerring sense of orientation led him on. Once he stopped to drink
where the swift current of a creek kept the water open. Even then he
gulped in haste--and shot on. The moon drifted lower and lower until it
sank into oblivion. The stars began to fade away The little ones went
out, and the big ones grew sleepy and dull. A great snow-ghostly gloom
settled over the forest world.

In the six hours between midnight and dawn he covered thirty-five miles.

And then he stopped. Dropping on his belly beside a rock at the crest
of a ridge he watched the birth of day. With drooling jaws and panting
breath he rested, until at last the dull gold of the winter sun began
to paint the eastern sky. And then came the first bars of vivid
sunlight, shooting over the eastern ramparts as guns flash from behind
their battlements, and Miki rose to his feet and surveyed the morning
wonder of his world. Behind him was Fort O' God, fifty miles away;
ahead of him the cabin--twenty. It was the cabin he faced as he went
down from the ridge.

As the miles between him and the cabin grew fewer and fewer he felt
again something of the oppression that had borne upon him at
Challoner's tent. And yet it was different. He had run his race. He had
answer