The clump of timber thinned out, and Roscoe struck out boldly into the low bush. As he went, he wondered what would happen in the cabin. He believed that Henry, of the four, would not pull through alive, and that Croker would come out best. It was not until the following summer that he learned the facts of Henry's madness, and of the terrible manner in which he avenged himself on Croker by sticking a knife under the latter's ribs. For the first time in his life Roscoe found himself in a position to measure accurately the amount of energy contained in a slice of bacon and a cold biscuit. It was not much. Long before noon his old weakness was upon him again. He found even greater difficulty in dragging his feet over the snow, and it seemed now as though all ambition had left him, and that even the fighting spark was becoming disheartened. He made up his mind to go on until the arctic gloom of night began mingling with the storm; then he would stop, build a fire, and go to sleep in its warmth. He would never wake up, and there would be no sensation of discomfort in his dying. During the afternoon he passed out of the scrub into a rougher country. His progress was slower, but more comfortable, for at times he found himself protected from the wind. A gloom darker and more sombre than that of the storm was falling about him when he came to what appeared to be the end of the Barren. The earth dropped away from under his feet, and far below him, in a ravine shut out from wind and storm, he saw the black tops of thick spruce. What life was left in him leaped joyously, and he began to scramble downward. His eyes were no longer fit to judge distance or chance, and he slipped. He slipped a dozen times in the first five minutes, and then there came the time when he did not make a recovery, but plunged down the side of the mountain like a rock. He stopped with a terrific jar, and for the first time during the fall he wanted to cry out with pain. But the voice that he heard did not come from his own lips. It was another voice--and then two, three, many of them. His dazed eyes caught glimpses of dark objects floundering in the deep snow about him, and just beyond these objects were four or five tall mounds of snow, like tents, arranged in a circle. A number of times that winter Roscoe had seen mounds of snow like these, and he knew what they meant. He had fallen into an Indian village. He tried to call out the words of greeting that Rameses had taught him, but he had no tongue. Then the floundering figures caught him up, and he was carried to the circle of snow-mounds. The last that he knew was that warmth was entering his lungs, and that once again there came to him the low, sweet music of a Cree girl's voice.