Then, in the midst of his stride, Marcus, the leader, set his four feet hard on the snow crust and slid on his hams, the six others piling up at his back in confusion with sharp yelps of consternation. Over the tangle of the pack whined and cracked the long whip of Polaris, and cracked and whined vainly. Marcus would not budge. He lifted his gray muzzle in a weird howl of protest and bewilderment, and the hair along his spine bristled. Behind him Octavius, Julius, Nero, and Hector took up the cry of astonishment, and the mellower notes of Pallas and Juno chimed in. Polaris straightened out, like the good driver that he was, the sad kinks in the harness and ran forward; but he had gone but a few paces when he, too, stopped in the snow, and stood staring ahead and down. They were at the brink of a trail! There it lay, stretching from somewhere near the base of the mountains, away across the great plains--a broad, recently traveled path, with footprints plain upon the snow--_the footprints of men!_ CHAPTER VIII THE STRANGER Polaris stood so long at the lip of the strange path that Rose Emer uncurled from her seat on the sledge and ran forward to see what held him. "A path--in this wilderness!" she cried in wonder. And then: "Why, we must be near to one of Captain Scoland's stations. Our troubles are nearly at an end." "No, lady; I think these tracks lead to no station of your captain's, and our troubles may be just begun. Here are the tracks of many men--" "But they must be those of our men," returned Rose Emer, "for who else could have made them?" Polaris stepped into the trail and examined it with keen eyes. "Lady, did they of your company dress their feet as do you or as I do?" he asked, pointing to his moccasins of bearskin. "Why, they wore heavy boots of felt, with an overshoe of leather, spiked with steel," said the girl. "And did they have with them any beasts other than the dogs of which you have told me?" queried Polaris. Rose Emer shook her head. "No, they had only the dogs," she replied. "What tracks are there?" Polaris arose from his examination of the trail. "Now, of all the strange things we have met by land and by sea, I account this the strangest of all," he said. "Here are the footprints of many men whose feet were clad as are my own, and with them the marks of a heavy sledge and the tracks of four-footed animals new to me--unless, indeed, they be those of dogs in boots--" "What? Show me where!" Rose Emer knelt beside him to stare at the medley of footprints. She looked up at him wide-eyed a moment later. "Why, this is impossible!" she gasped. "And yet--what _can_ it mean? Those are the hoofprints of unshod horses!"