Breaking the track and pulling hard on his leading line, the young man, with unseeing eyes set in his haggard face, strode, or rather stumbled along, leaning far over his stride like one ever on the verge of falling. For the last hour and more he had abandoned any attempt to hold the trail. The main direction he knew lay down this frozen lake, and between the flanking lines of low bush half a mile distant on either side. Half a day’s journey away was the Hudson’s Bay Post, the last lap in their fifteen days’ struggle against wind and sun and snow-blocked trail. A struggle it was of growing desperation. For the first three days of their journey they knocked off their twenty miles a day, all four running lightly. Then a three days’ blizzard held them fast, with their grub sack growing lighter. For the next four days the best that was in them could cover a bare ten miles a day, for the woman whose feverish eagerness had driven them through the last weary miles of every day’s run, had fallen in her tracks and against fierce protestations had been forced to the toboggan. Again a blizzard of three days brought them to starvation rations, with still thirty-five miles between them and safety. The night before the woman had converse with the young man. “Paul, you will need to do the driving now,” said the woman. “I can no longer. We must make the Post, Paul. Why not take the children with you and leave me in camp here? You can run swiftly and come back for me. I don’t wish to be the death of all of you. It is I that have been a curse to you and your family from the first. Oh, if I could pay the price by dying now!” “Onawata, you are always wise, but tonight you are not wise. I might go through alone and bring you help, but we shall try one day more. At any cost we must stick together.” “One day more then, Paul,” replied Onawata, “but promise me you will not sacrifice the living to the dying.” “Dying? Wait till we get you to a doctor. We will make a good run tomorrow.” “You will not promise? There is Tanna.” “God means us to go through. I know He does.” The Calvinist in him forbade despair. He had the sense of being somehow included in the plan of the eternal decrees. Nothing could kill that conviction. And hence he would, he must follow his gleam so far as it led. “Promise me, Paul,” pleaded the Indian woman with passionate intensity. “Death has spoken to me. I have heard his voice. Soon, soon, a few weeks at most, I go with him. Why should the young die for me?” “I promise to do the best for them,” said Paul solemnly. “And if the choice comes at last you will choose that they shall live?” “Yes, I will promise.” “Good! You will not fail. You have never been anything but true, Paul. Your God will not fail you.” “Your God, too, Onawata,” said Paul gently.