"I ain't goin' to tell you not to worry," Christopher went on, after a time. "I'm no fool, and you're no fool. It's a hard proposition, Mr. Wade. A lunatic whirling in a snow-cloud like a leaf, round and round, and then driftin' out, and no way in the world of tellin' where he came from! And there's some one--off that way he came from--that you want terrible bad! Yet even that lunatic's tracks have been patted smooth by the wind. It's no time to talk to human critters, Mr. Wade. It would be 'Run this way and run that!' Let the woods talk to you! They've been wrastlin' the big winds all day. They'll probably have to wrastle 'em again to-morrow. And they'll be ready for the fight. Hear 'em sleep? The same for you and for me, Mr. Wade. Go in and sleep, and be ready for what comes to-morrow." He walked ahead, leading the way back to camp, and Wade followed, every aching muscle crying for rest, though his heart, aching more poignantly, called on him to plunge into the forest in search of the helpless hostage the woods were hiding. It is not in the nature of woodsmen to pry into another's reason for this or that. Barnum Withee gave Christopher Straight a chance to tell why he and his employer were so far off the Enchanted operation; but when Christopher Straight smoked on without explaining, Barnum Withee smoked on without asking questions. In one of the dim bunks of the wangan Wade breathed stertorously, drugged with nature's opiate of utter weariness. And after listening a moment with an air of relief, Christopher broke upon Withee's meditations. "Was you tellin' me where Lane has been makin' his headquarters since he skipped the fire station?" he inquired, innocently. "I was thinkin' about him, too," returned Withee, promptly. "Headquarters! Does an Injun devil with a steel trap on his tail have headquarters while he's runnin' and yowlin'? Whether he's been in the air or in a hole since he went out of his head, time of the fire, I don't know. Eye ain't been laid on him till he come out of that snow-squall, walkin' like an icicle and hootin' like a barn owl." "Heard of any goods bein' missed from any depot camps?" pursued the woodsman, shrewdly. "That might tell where he's been hangin' out." "No," said the operator, suddenly brusque. Then he looked up from the sliver that he had been whittling absent-mindedly, and fixed keen eye on Straight. "Say, look here, Chris, if you and your young friend are over here huntin' for Lane, or for any documents or papers or evidence to make more trouble for Honorable John Barrett, I've got to tell you that you can't ring me in. Honorable Barrett and me has fixed!" "I reckoned you would," said Christopher. "Stumpage kings usually get their own way."