“He faced round like a wild man, and before I could lift a hand he had his rifle raised, and with the yell of a maniac he fired blindly in my direction. I felt the bullet fan my ear.
“‘What on earth are you trying to do, Nevins?’ I asked in as firm a voice as I could assume, but I’m afraid it was as wobbly as a dish of jelly. ‘Are you crazy?’
“‘Crazy!’ he echoed with a wild laugh. ‘It’s you that are crazy. Come on, follow me. I’ll save you from those creatures that are after us.’
“There was nothing to do but to obey. Up I got and started on again after Nevins, who went staggering along, edging from side to side of the trail like a dizzy man. I found myself wondering how it was all going to end. I’m pretty tough and hard to tire, but I felt almost all in, and Nevins, not nearly so strong as I was, must have been going solely on the unnatural strength lent him by his insanity.
“By and by it got dark, but Nevins kept on. He kept shouting back at me, and I’d answer him from time to time. I couldn’t let him go on alone, although I was almost dead. After a while his shouts grew less frequent and finally they died out altogether. I guessed what had probably happened. I thought that by and by if I kept on I would stumble over his body lying in the snow.
“For a long time I walked slowly, every minute expecting to come upon him, but he was nowhere on the trail. I don’t like to recall that night nor the next day when I went on staggering down the trail till I began to get crazy, too, and hear odd things and voices.
“If it hadn’t been that a party from the station out hunting found me I don’t like to think of what might have happened. I soon came round and told all I could about Nevins. A search party started out at once, but returned the next day empty-handed. They had found and then lost tracks of many snow shoes in the woods near the trail. We always suspected that Nevins had wandered off the trail when I missed him, been found dead by Blood Indians, robbed and buried in a drift.... And that, boys, is one incident in the life of a trooper of the Mounted.”
“It’s a ghastly story,” shuddered Ralph, while the others looked grave and sober.
“Chum around with a bunch of troopers some time and you’ll hear stranger yarns than that,” said Trooper Carthew. “And,” he added thoughtfully, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, “the worst of it is, they are all true. There’s no need to do any fancy color work on ’em.”