"Why?" cried Trascott, in wonder and sympathy. "Why?"
"Lessari and I went up the Klondike River," continued Britton, without answering the curate, "toward the region of the five hills as I had mapped out the way. Never mind the details or the hardships, but listen to some points which are essential parts of what I am trying to tell. When we passed through the Klondike Cañon, we heard a dog-train coming after us, but it never appeared to our sight. Lessari fainted from fatigue and exposure within six miles of our destination. I made camp and nursed him that night. In the morning our dogs were poisoned."
"Poisoned?" echoed Ainsworth. "Great heaven!–how?"
"It was a mystery which has since been explained to me," Rex said. "Let it stand a moment!"
"But if a human hand did that it was murder," interposed the shocked Trascott. "It was deliberate, diabolical murder–the easiest method of killing you by cutting off your means of egress from that frozen wilderness!"
Rex nodded, fingering a sheathed hunting-knife that lay with the cartridges upon the table.
"Exactly so," he observed. "You have hit the truth. Lessari and I tramped on next day in the hope of finding game or discovering an Indian encampment. We kept to the river as a guide, dragging our precious food and outfit on the sled, and entered the cup of the five hills.
"There a three hundred foot chasm blocked our way. We searched for a path round it, leaving our sleigh at the top, after having first placed a slab of granite before the runners so that there was no chance of it slipping into the abyss.
"The means of circumventing the precipice we found by following along the edge till we descended into a cavern which ran through the bed-rock of the river–"
"The cavern where you made the strike?" Trascott asked, in interruption.