“Snow-Burner,” she said softly, “this is the man, Iron Hair, who digs the gold which you want. We go to rob him. I understand. You play at drinking to fool Iron Hair. It is well. Tillie will help the Snow-Burner. We will kill Iron Hair and take his gold. Then the Snow-Burner will come with Tillie to her tepee?”
Reivers looked at her, and for the first time he felt a revulsion against the base part he was playing. Would he return with Tillie to her tepee when this affair was over? Would he go on with his old way of living, the base part of him triumphant over the better self? The strange questions rapped like trip-hammers on Reivers’ conscience.
“Get on the sledge!” he growled, choked with anger.
She did not stir. He struck her cruelly. Tillie smiled. That was like the Snow-Burner of old; and she waddled to her appointed place without further question.
Up the gulch from Raftery’s came Moir quietly leading his dogs, the sledge well loaded with cases of liquor.
“Wilt have a kiss first of all,” he laughed excitedly, and catching Neopa in his arms tossed her in the air, kissed her loudly on her averted cheeks and set her back on the sledge. “Now, old son, follow and follow quietly. When Iron Hair travels he wants no Fifty Mile gang on his trail. Say nothing, but keep me in sight. Heyah, mush, mush!”
Out of the gully he led the way swiftly and silently to the open country beyond the settlement. There he circled in a confusing way, bearing northward. After an hour he began circling again, doubling on his trail to make it hard for any one to follow, but finally Reivers knew by the stars that the course lay to the south. Another series of false twists in the trail, then Moir struck out in determined fashion on a straight course, east and a trifle south from Fifty Mile.
Reivers, silently guiding his dogs in the tracks made by Moir, breathed hard as he read the stars. By the pace that Moir was setting it seemed certain that he now was making for his camp in a direct line. But if so, if this trail were held, it would take them back toward the Dead Lands, straight into the country that was Duncan MacGregor’s trapping-ground. Could the mine be in that region. If so, how could it have escaped the notice of the old trapper?
It was well past midnight when Reivers saw the team ahead disappear in a depression in the ground and heard Moir’s voice loudly calling a halt. By the time Reivers came up with his two sledges Moir had unhitched his dogs on the flat of a frozen river-bed and was hurriedly dragging a bottle from one of the cases on his sledge.
“Hell’s fire, old son; unhook and camp. The liquor’s dying in me, and I had just begun to feel good.”