The fourth night after he had left the plague-stricken cabin Billy was camped on Lame Otter Creek, one hundred and eighty miles from Fort Churchill, over on Hudson's Bay. He had eaten his supper, and was smoking his pipe. It was a clear and glorious night, with the sky afire with stars and a full moon. Several times Billy had stared at the moon. It was what the Indians called "the bleeding moon"-- red as blood, with an uneven, dripping edge. It was the Indian superstition that it meant misfortune to those who did not keep it at their backs. For seven consecutive nights it had made a red trail through the skies in that terrible year of plague nineteen years before, when a quarter of the forest population of the north had died. Since then it had been known as the "plague moon." Billy had seen it only twice before. He was not superstitious, but to-night he was filled with a strange sensation of uneasiness. He laughed an unpleasant laugh as he stared into the crackling birch flames and wondered what new misfortune could come to him. And then, slowly, something seemed to come to him from out of the wonderful night like a quieting hand to still the pain in his broken heart. At last, once more, he was home. For the wind-swept Barrens and the forest had been his home, and more than once he had told himself that life away from them would be impossible for him. More deeply than ever this thought came to him to-night. He had become a part of them and they a part of him. And as he looked up again at the red moon the sight of it no longer brought him uneasiness, but a strange sort of joy. For an hour he sat there, and the fire died down. About him the rustle and whisper of the wild closed in nearer. It was his world, and he breathed more deeply and listened. Lonely and sick at heart, he felt the life and sympathy and love of it creeping into him, grieving with him in his grief, warming him with its hope, pledging him again the eternal friendship of its trees, its mountains, and all of the wild that it held therein. A hundred times, in that strange man-play that comes of loneliness in the far north, he had given life and form to the star shadows about him, to the shadows of the tall spruce, the twisted shrub, the rocks, and even the mountains. And now it was no longer play. With each hour that passed this night, and with each day and night that followed, they became more real to MacVeigh; and the fires he built in the black gloom painted him pictures as they had never painted them before; and the trees and the rocks and the twisted shrub comforted him more and more in his loneliness, and gave to him the presence of life in their movement, in the coming and going of their shadow forms. Everywhere they were the same old friends, unvarying and changeless. The spruce shadow of to-night, nodding to him in its silent way, was the same that nodded to him last night-- a hundred nights ago; the stars were the same, the winds whispering to