"You--said this was the way," the pathfinder whimpered. "You made me--turn off--" Folsom uttered a growl and advanced a step, whereupon his victim gurgled: "D-don't touch me! That's the Imnachuck, so help me God! I'm--I'm almost sure it is." "_Almost_!" The speaker stooped for his mittens and shook the snow out of them; he was still struggling to control himself. "Look here, Mr. Know-It-All, I've never been here before, and you have; somewhere in your thick skull there must be some faint remembrance of the country. You got us into this fix, and I'm going to give you one more chance to get us out of it. Don't try to think with your head, let your feet think for you, and maybe they'll carry you to the right gulch. If they don't--" Folsom scanned the brooding heavens and his lips compressed. "We're in for a storm and--we'll never weather it. Take one look while there's light to see by, then turn your feet loose and pray that they lead you right, for if they don't, by God, I'll cut you loose!" It soon proved that memory lay neither in Harkness's head nor in his feet; when he had veered aimlessly about for half an hour, evidently fearing to commit himself to a definite course, and when the wind came whooping down, rolling a twilight smother ahead of it, Folsom turned his dogs into the nearest depression and urged them to a run. The grade increased, soon brittle willow-tops brushed against the speeding sled: this brush grew higher as the two men, blinded now by the gale, stumbled onward behind the team. They emerged from the gulch into a wider valley, after a while, and a mile further on the dogs burst through a grove of cottonwoods and fetched up before a lighted cabin window. Harkness pulled back his parka hood and cried, boastfully: "What did I tell you? I knew where I was all the time." Then he went in, leaving his partner to unhitch the team and care for it. Friendships ripen and enmities deepen quickly on the trail, seeds of discord sprout and flourish in the cold. Folsom's burst of temper had served to inflame a mutual dislike, and as he and Harkness journeyed northward that dislike deepened into something akin to hatred, for the men shared the same bed, drank from the same pot, endured the same exasperations. Nothing except their hope of mutual profit held them together. In our careless search for cause and effect we are accustomed to attribute important issues to important happenings, amazing consequences to amazing deeds; as a matter of fact it is the trivial action, the little thing, the thing unnoticed and forgotten which bends our pathways and makes or breaks us. Harkness was a hare-brained, irresponsible person, incapable of steadiness in thought or action, too weak to cherish actual hatred, too changeable to nurse a lasting grudge. It is with such frail instruments that prankish fate delights to work, and, although he never suspected it, the luxury of yielding to that sudden gust of passion cost Folsom dear.