by morning. They've made a record haul, and that old sinner wants to charge me more than fifty cents a stick for the fish I'm getting from him. But he's not going to cut any ice off me. He won't let me have half what I want, either."
"They can't carry more than a certain amount themselves."
"Why—they don't go far for their hunting, you know. They cache a lot here and come back for it. Anyhow, they can punch holes in the ice and get some more if they're pushed. Got any news yet?"
"No. They're hunting up an Esquimaux who came up with fur from Herschel, and didn't go back with the others."
"Oh! Well, I wish you luck. Here he is. My word; they're pretty good chunks of fat, aren't they?"
The stocky broad-nosed little man could speak a little English. Dick possessed a few Esquimaux words and a very great deal of intuition, and in a little while he knew on which stage he was to play his first grim act with Grange's Andree. She had gone to the Arctic Ocean; down the mighty Mackenzie River where its many mouths open to salt water, and the Esquimaux pass in their kyaks and build their snow igloes.
"Now, what in the nation could have taken her there?" said Hensham.
"Whalers," said Dick briefly, and for a little while he would not speak again.
The Esquimaux had passed her in a birch canoe with an Indian behind her. But Dick knew that she would stay with neither Indian nor Esquimaux. If she had gone aboard a whaler which happened to winter this year at Herschel there was no escape for her. But if that whaler, Yankee, or Russian, or Norwegian, manned by English or the daring sailor-men of Labrador; if that whaler went home through those smoking seas of winter, Dick's chase had only just begun, and Grange's Andree might draw him at her heels for a year yet.
This knowledge roused in him again that hunting instinct which was seldom dulled for long. Sudden savage desire to run his quarry down rose above his pity and
