They looked at the Indian in awed and speechless horror. His tale of suffering was told before he spoke. He had come from a land of Tragedy. He had been stalking side by side with Death.

This was a mere shadowy caricature of the Mookoomahn Bob had known. The face was fleshless as that of a skeleton head, with the skin of the former inhabitant stretched and dried upon the bones; the lips so shrunken that they scarcely served to cover the two white lines of teeth; the eyes deep fallen into gaping cavities below the frontal bone.

Drawing his skeleton hands from their mittens, and raising them in an imploring gesture, Mookoomahn looked, as he stood there in the dim candlelight under the low log ceiling, more a spectre--a ghostly phantom visitor--than a living human being.

Then he spoke in a voice low and broken:

"White Brother of the Snow, Mookoomahn has long been tormented by the Spirit of Hunger. When he slept the Spirit of Starvation sat by his side, never sleeping. When he travelled the Spirit of Starvation stalked at his heels, never tiring. For many suns the Spirit of Death has had his cold fingers on Mookoomahn's shoulder."

Gently Bob removed the caribou-skin coat from the starving and exhausted traveller, and made him comfortable while the others brewed tea and heated some cold boiled ptarmigan in the pan.

"'Twon't do t' give he much at first," cautioned Dick Blake, setting before Mookoomahn a small portion of the meat and a small piece of bread with a cup of the hot tea. "He's like t' be wonderful sick, anyway, th' carefullest we is. We'll let he have a small bit at a time, an' let he have un often."

No questions were asked until after the Indian had eaten. It seemed almost that no questions were necessary. The man had come alone. He was in the last stages of starvation. These facts spoke loudly enough. They told the tale of wasting strength, of hopeless struggle, of tragic death that had taken place in the bleak wild wastes above.

The food revived and the tea stimulated Mookoomahn, and when he spoke again, in answer to Bob's urgent request that he tell them of the fate of Shad and the others, his voice was stronger.

He described the journey to the Lake of Willows, and thence to the camp of starving Indians. He told how the shaman ............