haps. And I wonder what you will say when I tell you that we must go back to Fort Saskatchewan after all."
She went red, then white. His repulse had roused her temper, and fury and terror swept her like the wind on a harp.
"I will not," she screamed. "I will not. You can make me keel, but I will not."
He moved past her and began to kick up the tent-pegs.
"Get your things together," he said. "And be quick."
"I will not," she screamed again.
He made no answer. He struck the tent, rolled it, and stowed the cooking-box and the shovel and axe on the sled. The snow blew in his face, and the trail would be lessening each moment, and in this heavy storm he could see no land-marks. Andree stood with her blue hands clenched up, and the snow wet on her face. Then she hurled herself down full-length, sobbing, and beating the snow into spray about her. Dick left his work and went to her, recognising grimly that just retribution had caught him very soon. But it was long before he could get her on her feet, because he would not employ the only method which she wanted. Wisdom told him to stay in camp until the storm broke. Irritated temper told him that he could not sit still for twenty or thirty hours with Andree. He got away at last, with Andree beside the sled. She snapped at him like a husky when he spoke to her, and he went to the lead in silence. Among the pines and the rough spurs the winding trail was difficult to follow. Drifts blocked it; and the wind which he had kept on his left cheek began to blow in whirlwinds round them, and the trail was gone. But he would not believe that he could lose himself on this comparatively easy piece of track, and until the dogs were too weary to go further he plodded on in the deepening snow, making camp at last almost, as he guessed, within sight of Macpherson.
Utter exhaustion and sullen anger kept them both silent that night, and Dick slept like a log, waking sometimes in the dim half-light which was all the day gave now. For, though south from Herschel by more than two hundred miles, they were still well within the Arctic Circle, and at Herschel the sun would have ceased to lift above the
