With the blessing of the woman ringing in their ears they started on the trail of René Bossuet. When they were out of sight of the cabin, the Indian halted and looked straight into the boy's eyes.
"We have one day's grub, for a three-day's trail if we hit straight for Fort Norman," he announced. "Why then do we follow this man's trail? He has done nothing to us! Why do you always take upon yourself the troubles of others?"
"Where would you have been if I didn't?" flashed the boy angrily. "And where would the trapper have been and that woman and little baby? When I first struck Alaska I was just a little kid with torn clothes and only eight dollars and I thought I didn't have a friend in the world. And then, at Anvik, I found that every one of the big men of the North was my friend! And ever since that time I have been trying to pay back the debt I owe the men of the North—and I'll keep on trying till I die!"
With a shrug 'Merican Joe started his dogs and took up the trail. Two hours later Connie took the lead, and pointed to the tracks in the snow. "He's slowing up," he exclaimed. "If we don't strike his camp within a half an hour, we'll strike—something else!"
A few minutes later both halted abruptly. Before them was a wide place in the snow that had been trampled by many feet—the soft padded feet of the wolf pack. A toboggan, with its pack still securely lashed, stood at the end of René Bossuet's trail. Small scraps of leather showed where the dogs had been torn from the harness. Connie closed his eyes and pictured to himself what had happened there, in the night, in the sound of the roaring wind, and in the changing lights of the brilliantly flashing aurora. Then he opened his eyes and stepped out into the trampled space and gazed thoughtfully down upon the few scattered bits that lay strewn about upon the snow—a grinning skull, deeply gored here and there with fang marks, the gnawed ends of bones, and here and there ravellings and tiny patches of vivid blue cloth. And as he fastened the toboggan behind his own and swung the dogs onto the back-trail, he paused once more and smiled grimly:
"He had always lived in the North," he said, "but he didn't know the North. He ran like the coward he was from the red death when there was no danger. And not only that, but he stole the food from a woman and a sick baby. He thought he could get away with it—'way up here. But there's something in the silent places that men don't understand—and never will understand. I've heard men speak of it. And now I have seen it—the working of the justice of the North!"