“Ho! ho! ho!” laughed the outlaw. “That sounds good! I've gone by another name, of course, and that's the first time I've heard my own since—”
He stopped suddenly, and the laugh left his voice and face.
“It sounds—homelike,” he added more gently. “What's yours, pardner?”
“Steele—Philip Steele, of the R.N.W.M.P.,” said Philip.
“Used to know a Steele once,” went on DeBar. “That was back—where it happened. He was one of my friends.”
For a moment he turned his eyes on Philip. They were deep gray eyes, set well apart in a face that among a hundred others Philip would have picked out for its frankness and courage. He knew that the man before him was not much more than his own age, yet he appeared ten years older.
He sat up on his sledge as DeBar left his bird to thrust sticks into the snow, on the ends of which he hung Philip's frozen garments close to the fire. From the man Philip's eyes traveled to the dog. The hound yawned in the heat and he saw that one of his fangs was gone.
“If you're starving, why don't you kill the dog?” he asked.
DeBar turned quickly, his white teeth gleaming through his beard.
“Because he's the best friend I've got on earth, or next to the best,” he said warmly. “He's stuck to me through thick and thin for ten years. He starved with me, and fought with me, and half died with me, and he's going to live with me as long as I live. Would you eat the flesh of your brother, Steele? He's my brother—the last that your glorious law has left to me. Would you kill him if you were me?”