"It isn't best," protested the old man. "I've no quarrel with Colin MacLeod. It means trouble if you show in sight there without your men behind you." "But I'm going," insisted Wade, with such positiveness that old Christopher merely sighed. "I'll let you go into the camp alone," allowed Wade, "for I am not fool enough to look for trouble just to find it; but I'll be waiting for you up the tote road with the moose-sled, and I'll haul her home here out of that hell." "I can't blame you for wantin' to play hoss for her," said the woodsman, with a little malice in his humor. "And if she is like most girls she'll be willin' to have you do it." Ten minutes later the two were away down the tote road. They said nothing of their purpose except to Nina Ide, whom they left intrenched in the wangan--a woods maiden who felt perfectly certain of the chivalry of the men of the woods about her. The storm was over, but the heavens were still black. Wade dragged the moose-sled, walking behind old Christopher in the patch of radiance that the lantern flung upon the snow. Treading ever and ever on the same whiteness in that little circle of light, it seemed to Wade that he was making no progress, but that the big trees were silently crowding their way past like spectres, and that he, for all his passion of fear and foreboding, simply lifted his feet to make idle tracks. The winds were still, and the only sounds were the rasping of legs and snow-shoes, and the soft thuddings of snow-chunks dropped from the limbs of overladen trees. In the first gray of the morning, swinging off the tote road and down into the depths of Jerusalem valley, they at last came upon the scattered spruce-tops and fresh chips that marked the circle of Britt's winter operation. The young man's good sense rebuked his rebelliousness when Christopher took the cord of the sled and bade him wait where he was. "I don't blame you for feeling that way," said the old man, interpreting Wade's wordless mutterings; "but the easiest way is always the best. If she is there she will want to come with me, where Miss Ide is waiting for her, and the word of the young lady will be respected. I'm afraid your word wouldn't be--not with Colin MacLeod," he added, grimly. And yet Dwight Wade watched the lantern-light flicker down the valley with a secret and shamed feeling that he was a coward not to be the first to hold out a hand of succor to the girl he loved. That he had to wait hidden there in the woods while another represented him chafed his spirits until he strode up and down and snarled at the reddening east.