For an instant they both stared at the tree trunk motionless. Then Ross, with a sudden narrowing of his eyes and upward tilt of his square chin, strode forward, drew off his mitten and extended his arm. The marks were shoulder high. Leslie gave an exclamation as Ross grasped the trunk, his four fingers covering the four streaks of blood, his thumb pressed on the fainter blotch. Then his hand fell to his side. "A man!" gasped Leslie. His face turned white. "Ross, did I shoot a man?" "That would account for things," said Ross slowly. He looked back. Only a few feet intervened between the tree and the blood on the crust. "If you hurt his hand--and he steadied himself here at this tree, and then ran on--perhaps before he realized that he was hurt--and then staunched the flow in his mittens or on his clothes--anywhere----" "It was Sandy!" exclaimed Leslie. His voice was weak, also his knees. "Or Weston," added Ross and scowled. "He--they were looking in the window----" began Leslie. "And slipped and fell against the glass," added Ross. Only one more proof was needed to convince them that Leslie had drawn human blood, and that proof they found where they had not thought to look previously--beneath the window. There, in the loose snow blown against the side of the shack, was the blurred impression of a snow-shoe. "I believe," said Ross with conviction that night as they sat beside the fire with their door barred and the window securely shuttered, "I believe, Less, that it was Sandy and perhaps Waymart, coming to see if Weston had done his duty by us." "But where did they come from?" questioned Leslie. "Where are we? Can they get over to Meadow Creek and from there here? Or is there another way of getting here?" It was months before that persistent question was answered, months of a dull routine wherein the boys turned with more and more zeal to their studies. Nights now, behind their barred door and shuttered window, they listened, not for wolves, but for the return of their human caller, but he did not come again. Day after day they looked sharply for prints of snow-shoes, but looked in vain. Gradually as the spring advanced, the wolves and coyotes retreated until the boys no longer carried the gun on their wood-cutting excursions. "I guess Sue will not see a wolf skin this year," Leslie complained in March. "Even in that I have failed." Ross, standing over the stove frying bacon, glanced over his shoulder. "Brace up, Less," he gibed. "There's one thing you haven't failed in, nor I either. We've got outside of more anatomy and physiology and----" "That's so," Leslie interrupted brightening. "I've found out what I want to do--after I've made my peace with father," soberly. "I guess he'll not make any objections to a doctor in the family. It strikes me," lugubriously, "that he'll be pleased to find out that I want to be anything!"