The journey extended over a month. The last three weeks of it were starvation. At first this meant merely discomfort and the bearing of a certain amount of pain. Later it became acute suffering. Later still it developed into a necessity for proving what virtue resided in the bottom of these men's souls.

Perforce now they must make a choice of what ideas they would keep. Some things must be given up, just as some things had to be discarded when they had lightened the sledge. All the lesser lumber had long since gone. Certain bigger things still remained.

They held grimly to the idea of catching the Indian. Their natural love of life held tenaciously to a hope of return. An equally natural hope clung to the ridiculous idea that the impossible might happen, that the needle should drop from the haystack, that the caribou might spring into their view from the emptiness of space. Now it seemed that they must make a choice between the first two.

"Dick," said Bolton, solemnly, "we've mighty little pemmican left. If we turn around now, it'll just about get us back to the woods. If we go on farther, we'll have to run into more food, or we'll never get out."

"I knew it," replied Dick.

"Well?"

Dick looked at him astonished. "Well, what?" he inquired.

"Shall we give it up?"

"Give it _up_!" cried the young man. "Of course not; what you thinking of?"

"There's the caribou," suggested Sam, doubtfully; "or maybe Jingoss has more grub than he's going to need. It's a slim chance."

They still further reduced the ration of pemmican. The malnutrition began to play them tricks. It dizzied their brains, swarmed the vastness with hordes of little, dancing black specks like mosquitoes. In the morning every muscle of their bodies was stiffened to the consistency of rawhide, and the movements necessary to loosen the fibres became an agony hardly to be endured. Nothing of voluntary consciousness remained, could remain, but the effort of lifting the feet, driving the dogs, following the Trail; but involuntary consciousness lent them strange hallucinations. They saw figures moving across the snow, but when they steadied their vision, nothing was there.

They began to stumble over nothing; occasionally to fall. In this was added effort, but more particularly added annoyance. They had continually to watch their footsteps. The walking was no longer involuntary, but they had definitely to think of each movement necessary to the step, and this gave them a further reason for preoccupation, for concentration. Dick's sullenness returned, more terrible than in the summer. He went forward with his head down, refusing to take notice of anything. He walked: that was to him the whole of existence.

Once reverting analogously to his grievance of that time, he mentioned the girl, saying briefly that soon they must all die, and it was better that she die now. Perhaps her share of the pemmican would bring them to their quarry. The idea of return--not abandoned, but persistently ignored--thrust into prominence this other,--to come to close quarters with the man they pursued, to die grappled with him, dragging him down to the same death by which these three perished. But Sam would have none of it, and Dick easily dropped the subject, relapsing into his grim monomania of pursuit.

In Dick's case even the hope of coming to grapples was fading. He somehow had little faith in his enemy. The............