CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
Prologue [11]
I Acey Smith [16]
II A Strange Pact on a Train [23]
III “Honour Sinks Where Commerce Long Prevails” [33]
IV “A Stoic of the woods—A Man Without a Tear” [44]
V The Way of a Woman [56]
VI A Millionaire Vanishes [65]
VII The Hill of Lurking Death [76]
VIII A Master Mind [87]
IX The Wonder Girl [99]
X The White Monster of Nannabijou [109]
XI Captain Carlstone, V.C. [119]
XII “When All the World is Young, Lad!” [131]
XIII “Them Was Roaring Days!” [143]
XIV “A Beautiful, Pale Devil” [161]
XV The Fiat of J.C.X. [168]
XVI A Hoax That Proved a Boomerang [180]
XVII Ogima Bush [193]
XVIII In the Cup! [204]
XIX “Devil He May Be—But a Man!” [212]
XX Preparing to Beard the Lion [223]
XXI A Viper Bites at a File [234]
XXII The Night of the Tempest [246]
XXIII J.C.X! [258]
XXIV In Which a Fool Experiments [268]
XXV “The Man That Might Have Been” [278]
XXVI “The Man That Was” [289]
XXVII At the Meeting of the Trails [303]
XXVIII The Judgment of the Lowly [315]

PROLOGUE

Night’s sable curtain was soon to fall on the short-lived drama of a Winter day in the Laurentians. The departing sub-arctic sun, in its last pale glory, sent up from the omnipresent whiteness myriads of glistening beams that stabbed the eyes like leaping darts of fire. Of sounds there was oppressive absence. Not even a vagrant breeze sighed in the tree-tops; but at irregular intervals the intense stillness was smitten by the lugubrious “Spon-n-n-n-g!” of some aged tree splitting open to the heart where freezing moisture expanded in its crevices. All life and warmth seemed utterly exterminated in the pre-twilight calm save for the distant Monarch of Day slowly receding from his stark white world of desolation.

Yet even in these desolate wastes Man moved and had his being; for on the trail that wound down from the heights to the northwest there was the ribbonlike tracing of a dog sled and beside it the oval imprints of snowshoes. At a small cleared area in the scrub timber, just above where the trail dipped into a mighty, spruce-bearded ravine, the sled marks and the snowshoe patterns ceased.

On this spot, by a camp fire in the snow, hunched an elderly white man wrapped to his throat in blankets, beard and eyebrows thickly frosted from the vapour of his breath. His face, the wasted face of one who had endured intense physical suffering, was bereft of tangible expression; his eyes fixed dully on the slow-leaping, soundless flames from which there ascended into the zero-freighted air a wispy, hairlike strand of smoke. Roundabout him were scattered canvas packsacks, rolls of bright coloured woollen blankets, fire-blackened pots and pans, two light chopping axes and a short-barrelled repeating rifle. Nearby, on the trail, a spent and footsore string of sled dogs lay flattened in the snow. Noses stretched to the fire, eyes closed and limbs inert, they might be mistaken for dead and frozen things but for the occasional faint heave of their flanks as their trained lungs drew sparingly of the biting ozone.

Of a sudden the deathlike calm was shattered by the whining crack of a high-power rifle. Closer by there was a swish and flap of clumsy wings, and a dowdy, slate-coloured wesse-ke-jak circled the camp uttering dismal cries of “Meat—meat—meat!”

Every canine head came to life with a start. The figure in the blankets winced as though struck from behind by an unseen icy fist, doubling forward in a racking fit of coughing that reverberated through the solitudes in listless, unsympathetic echoes. The man desisted with a choking gasp, his frame shaking in a palsy. Weakly he slumped back against a nearby packsack, hands clutching at his heart.

“Laddie,” he called in a voice that was pitifully faint, “Laddie—oh, Laddie!”

His arms sagged and went limp by his sides, his breath coming and going in the swift, sibilant gasps of a life flickering out from exhaustion.