Gradually the stiffness left him, and his aching muscles limbered to their work. His moccasins sank noiselessly into the soft snow as mile after mile he traversed the broad ribbon of white.
At noon he camped, and over a tiny fire thawed out his bread and warmed his salmon, which he washed down with copious drafts of snow-water. Then he filled his pipe and blew great lungfuls of fragrant smoke into the air as he rested with his back against a giant pine and watched the fall of the snow.
During the last hour the character of the storm had changed. Cold, dry pellets, hissing earthward had replaced the aimless dance of the feathery flakes, and he could make out but dimly the opposite wall of the rod-wide tote-road.
He returned the remains of his luncheon to his pack, eying with disgust the heel of the loaf of hard bread and the soggy, red mass of sock-eye that remained in the can.
"The first man that mentions canned salmon to me," he growled, "is going to get hurt!"
The snow was ankle-deep when he again took the trail and lowered his head to the sting of the wind-driven particles. On and on he plodded, lifting his feet higher as the snow deepened. As yet, in his ignorance of woodcraft, no thought of danger entered his mind. "It is harder work, that is all," he thought; but, had he known it, his was a situation that no woodsman wise in the ways of the winter trails would have cared to face.
During the morning he had covered but fifteen of the forty miles which lay between the old shack and Moncrossen's camp. Each minute added to the difficulties of the journey, which, in the words of Daddy Dunnigan was "a fine two walks for a good man," and, with the added hardship of a heavy snowfall, would have been a man's-sized job for the best of them equipped, as they would have been, with good grub and snowshoes.
Bill was forced to rest frequently. Not only were his softened muscles feeling the strain—it was getting his wind, this steady bucking the snow—but each time he again faced the storm and plowed doggedly northward.
Darkness found him struggling knee-deep in the cold whiteness, and, as he paused to rest in the shelter of a pile of tops left by the axe-men, the foremost of the gray shadows that for the last two hours had dogged his footsteps, phantom-like, resolved itself into a very tangible pair of wicked eyes which smoldered in greenish points of hate above a very sharp, fang-studded muzzle, from which a long, red tongue licked suggestively at back-curled lips.