Carter, as usual, had made his bed in deep shadow, and there after a time he slept. The moon rose, but still the shadow enveloped him, while Peter lay in a glow of light when the man-hunter roused himself. He looked at his watch and found the hour a little after midnight. A second time he slept, and a second time he awakened, and thick darkness had come in place of the moonglow. This he knew to be the dark prelude to dawn, and he rose out of his blanket and crept cautiously away from the camp, moving a foot at a time and making no sound. In a quarter of an hour darkness and distance had swallowed him. He waited then. Dawn broke first over the tree-tops and filtered down softly and swiftly into the lower depths of the forest until Carter could see to travel. He lighted a last match to look at his watch and compass and struck due south.

He traveled fast, free of pack and gun. Dawn grew into the grayer softness of day. Peter would be awakening now, he thought, or very soon. In an hour, or two at the most, he would know he had been tricked. Even with his advantage Carter sensed the thrill of an impending race and the tragedy of it, if he should lose.[312] Peter was swift and sure in the woods and it was a long way to Five Fingers.

High up in the sky a fleet of white clouds took on a crimson flush. The sun rose, and it found Carter's face settling into the hard and grim lines of the hunter whose game had so frequently been the lives of men. In a small leather pouch he had stored some food, and a part of this he ate as he traveled. He lost no time in seeking log and driftwood dams to pave his way over streams but plunged waist-deep into water that was still cold with the chill of snow and ice. It was noon before he stopped to rest and eat what was left of the food in the leather pouch.

A second time a miracle of change swept over him, and in his face, his eyes and the lithe swiftness with which he moved he was the ferret again, hot on the trail of game. Late in the afternoon he felt the cool breath of Lake Superior in his face. The sun sank lower. Dusk came. In the beginning of that dusk he emerged from the last rim of the forest and stood with the water of the big inland sea moaning under the dark cliffs at his feet.

A sense of exultation and of triumph swept over him. It was something to have mastered the wilderness in this way and to have come out within half a dozen miles of Five Fingers. Peter could not beat that, even in this country which was his own.

Thickening darkness made these last miles more difficult and for two hours Carter progressed slowly.[313] The sky was beautifully clear, but rocks and slides and ragged cracks and pits at the cliff edge made his feet wary, and countless stars only served to deepen their shadows. When the moon came up he had reached the huge cliff whose sheer walls rose two hundred feet above the sea, less than half a mile from Five Fingers.

A last time he sat down, and with a strange smile on his thin lips watched the full moon as it rose swiftly over the forests, as if eager to reach its higher and more permanent place in the arch of the heavens. He was tired and wet and his clothes were torn. Until now, when the settlement was only a step ahead, he had not realized how exhausted he was or what a fight he had gone through. Surely he had beaten Peter by many miles and could afford to rest for a little while before finishing his task!

His eyes closed in restful stillness. In half a dozen minutes he could have slept, but each time that his body wavered on the rock where he sat he forced himself into rigid wakefulness. The temptation persisted, and at last he gave himself five minutes and slept thirty.

The rattle of a stone roused him, and he gathered himself up, blinking at the moon. Then he heard iron nails scraping on rock. Instantly he was wide awake. Someone was advancing along the face of the cliff from the direction of Five Fingers. He could see first the shadow of that person, growing in the illusive light mist of moon and stars. It was big and grotesque and the tread of its substance was slow and heavy. He[314] heard a cough which was as unpleasantly heavy as the tread, and a few steps more brought the advancing figure to the little plateau of rock where he sat. Not until then did he rise. The other stopped. The moon laughed down into their faces. The stars seemed to send upon them a more brilliant light. A dozen paces separated them. Then, uncertainly, they shortened it to half the distance. Carter's heart gave a great throb. He would not have to go down to Five Fingers now, for this was his man!

"Curry!" he greeted.

The other stared, half disbelieving. "Is that you—Carter?" he gasped. He advanced again, peering into the other's face. "By Heaven, it is!"

Carter was very white and thin and strange-looking in the moonlight, and Aleck Curry was heavy and huge, even to his neck and face. He thrust out a hand, but Carter did not touch it.

"Yes, it's me," he said, in a voice cold as ice. "Queer why you should be coming this way, Curry. I was going down there to find you."

Aleck's eyes pierced the blanket of moonlight behind him. "What luck?" he asked. His voice thrilled with nervous eagerness. He bent his big shoulders toward Carter, looking into his face, his thick lips parted and his narrow eyes gleaming anxiously as he tried to read an answer before words came. "Any?"

Carter's slowness was an insult, and with that insult his eyes and lips were smiling.

[315]

"Yes, I've had luck," he said, when the tenseness of the other's silence seemed about to break. "Donald McRae is dead, and Peter is back there—my prisoner!"

Half an hour later, down in Five Fingers, the bell over the little log church rang out sweetly and softly the good news that Father Albanel had come in from his monthly trip into the farther wilderness, and that services would be held tomorrow, which was Sunday. In the stillness of the night the music of the bell carried far through the forests, creeping in and out and high above the hidden places, bearing with it the peace and gentleness of benediction and prayer to all things.

Peter heard it, far back in the hollows between the ridges, and he paused to offer his gratitude to God for this voice that was welcoming him home.

And at the edge of the cliff where the moonlight and the starlight made a vivid arena of the table of rock its message seemed to beat with the clearness of a silvery drum. Then it stopped. Its echoes melted away, and the two men who had heard it there remained unchanged.

Carter seemed straighter and harder, his face more like carven stone. But he was ready. And Aleck Curry was like a huge gorilla gathering himself for a leap.

"Carter—if you mean that—I'll kill you!" he said in a voice that was thick with passion.

"I mean it," replied Carter, biting his words short.[316] "I've taken the trouble to tell you the whole story. But you can't understand and you never will. You're a snake. You're a traitor to both justice and the law. You think your power over Peter will give you vengeance and something from Mona. But it won't. And I warn you again that if you try to use your knowledge, if you offer Peter as a price to Mona, if you give him up to the law when she strikes you in the face—as she will!—then I shall go to the highest authorities and strip you to the skin. The truth will blast you. I will tell how you offered me bribes, and then threatened; I will tell of your affair in the home of Jacques Gautier and expose the horrible trail you have left wherever your slimy soul has gone. I shall investigate the death of the young Indian girl on the Arrowhead. I——"

He did not finish. Curry, the man who had waited, the fiend who had kept the fires of hatred and passion burning until they were madness, saw more than the threatened ruin for himself. Reputation, family, his place in the service meant nothing to him. What he saw now in the white and almost deathlike face and gleaming eyes of the Ferret was the end of the dream he had built up—the end not only of his power over Peter but of his last chance to possess Mona. If Carter carried out his threat, if he told the story of Gautier's wife and laid naked the truth of the Indian girl's death on the Arrowhead—then all that he might say against Peter would be discounted in the eyes of the law, and punishment would fall upon himself.

[317]

But he was not thinking of this punishment. At times the evil mind in his heavy head worked with amazing swiftness—and in this last moment of Carter's threat and defiance he saw the yawning abyss of the cliff behind the Ferret, and its overwhelming temptation. With Carter down there, dead, and Peter walking straight into the trap at Five Fingers, his own power and triumph would be more complete than he had ever dreamed it could be—for he would make Peter also the Ferret's murderer!

The moon revealed the monstrous thought that leaped like flame into his face, and it was then Carter cut his words short to meet the avalanche of flesh and fury that descended upon him.

Swift as a flash he sensed Curry's intention of th............