"Yes," said Hetty, with a little gasp. "If we don't meet him here he will have passed or gone by the other trail, and it will be too late to stop him. Can you hear anything, Flo?" Miss Schuyler strained her ears, but, though the horses were walking now, she could hear nothing. The deep silence round them was emphasized by the soft trample of the hoofs and thin jingle of steel that seemed unreal and out of place there in the wilderness of snow and stars. "No," she said, in a strained voice; "I can hear nothing at all. It almost makes one afraid to listen." They drove slowly for a minute or two, and then Hetty pulled up the team. "I can't go on, and it is worse to stand still," she said. "Flo, if he didn't stop--and he wouldn't--they would shoot him. He must be coming. Listen. There's a horrible buzzing in my ears--I can't hear at all." Miss Schuyler listened for what appeared an interminable time, and wondered afterwards that she had borne the tension without a sign. The great stillness grew overwhelming now the team had stopped, and there was that in the utter cold and sense of desolation that weighed her courage down. She felt her insignificance in the face of that vast emptiness and destroying frost, and wondered at the rashness of herself and Hetty and Larry Grant who had ventured to believe they could make any change in the great inexorable scheme of which everything that was to be was part. Miss Schuyler was not fanciful, but during the last hour she had borne a heavy strain, and the deathly stillness of the northwestern waste under the Arctic frost is apt to leave its impress on the most unimaginative. Suddenly very faint and far off, a rhythmic throbbing crept out of the darkness, and Flora Schuyler, who, fearing her ears had deceived her at first, dared not speak, felt her chilled blood stir when Hetty flung back her head. "Flo--can't you hear it? Tell me!" Miss Schuyler nodded, for she could not trust her voice just then; but the sound had grown louder while she listened and now it seemed flung back by the rise. Then, she lost it altogether as Hetty shook the reins and the sleigh went on again. In a few minutes, however, there was an answer to the thud of hoofs, and another soft drumming that came quivering through it sank and swelled again. By and by a clear, musical jingling broke in, and at last, when a moving object swung round a bend of the rise, a voice that rang harsh and commanding reached them. "Pull right up there, and wait until we see who you are," it said. "Larry!" cried Hetty; and the second time her strained voice broke and died away. "Larry!" It was less than a minute later when a sleigh stopped close in front of them, and, leaving one man in it, Grant sprang stiffly down. It took Hetty a minute or two more to make her warning plain, and Miss Schuyler found it necessary to put in a word of amplification occasionally. Then, Grant signed to the other man.