By main strength, Polaris tore the snarling brutes out of the bank and whipped them into the path. They dragged with them a heavy coat, the torn fragments of other garments, and a number of human bones, clean of flesh. Zenas Wright viewed the relics with a shudder. "Some one has perished here in the snow, and the bears have eaten him," he said. Polaris, exploring farther in the hole the dogs had dug, straightened up suddenly. "Some one has been done to death here," he said sternly. He held in his hand a ghastly skull. In it there were two holes, one at the base, the other in the forehead--the smooth, round holes that only a bullet leaves! Further examination of the snow disclosed other bones and fragments of clothing. There was nothing in the pockets of the coat or about the scene of the tragedy to indicate who it was that had met his death there, or whence he had come. He had died, the bears had devoured his remains, leaving naught but his bones and a mystery, which the snows had shrouded from all but the keen-nosed dogs. From the path above them Minos drove his team down and halted it close behind. He could not leave his dogs, and so Memene came on to find out the cause of the delay. Polaris hastily threw snow over his grim find so that the princess might not see it, and went back with her to tell the Sardanian. The king could make no more of the affair than could he. Polaris scraped away the snow and ice from the base of the pass-cliff, where a fissure ran up the rock, and there he laid the bones of the stranger, placing them well within the crevice, and covering them with the coat. He rolled a boulder to the mouth of the fissure and jammed it fast with all his strength. "It is all that we can do," he said. "Whoever he was, or where from, he sleeps, and cannot answer the least of our questions." "Who can have been here since we came?" Zenas Wright asked, as they once more went on down the pass. "Not sure am I that he was not already here before we passed this way," said Polaris. "But wouldn't the dogs have found him on the way in, in that case?" persisted Wright. "It was hereabouts that we did meet the bear when we entered Sardanes," replied Polaris. "At that time the dogs had noses only for the scent of their enemy, and might have passed a hundred corpses and given no sign. That poor fellow back yonder might have lain in his snow bed all unsuspected. He might have been there for months. The snow and the cold would have kept the bones as we found them. How it came about that a man from the outer world did penetrate the wilderness to Sardanes, and then was slain in her very portals, passes my comprehension."