"Well, did you find anything to give you a clue?" asked the geologist.
"I found the trail of a sledge and dogs on ahead of us," Polaris replied; "and know not what they may mean."
The old man regarded him sharply. "I hardly need to ask you if they were the tracks we made coming in?" he said.
"It was to be sure that they were not that I went on to see," said Polaris. "If it had not snowed since we came through, some parts of the road are so sheltered that our tracks might not have been filled in by the drift. But what I have seen sets aside all doubt. The tracks lead both ways!"
"Then some one has been on our trail, or, at least, over the same path, and has gone north again."
Polaris nodded.
"From the ship? That seems incomprehensible."
"That is to be told only when we reach the ship," answered Polaris; "that, and why a dead man lies in the north pass to Sardanes with a bullet hole through his head."
More enigmas waited along the road to the coast, but none as gruesome as the white bones of the unknown.
Turning to the west from the Hunters' Road, they skirted the great barrier range, and had made nearly half the distance to the end of their snow journeying when they came upon the spot where a camp had been made, and not many days before. The snow at the side of one of the hummocks was packed down where a man, or men, and dogs had slept. Search as they might, the adventurers could not find a trace to indicate who it was that traveled ahead of them.