“For a very good reason,” Barreau commented. “Which a man who knew as much of our affairs as you did, Cullen, should have guessed. Well, be on your way. Doubtless the Black Factor will welcome your coming.” The three men had laid down the shoulder-packs with which they were burdened. They re-slung them, and passed on with furtive sidelong glances; the women followed, dragging a lightly loaded toboggan. “Rats _will_ quit a doomed ship,” Barreau remarked. Then he resumed his turning of the meat that sizzled in the pan. “We will soon come up with them,” he said, when we had eaten and were putting the dogs to the toboggan again. “They cannot make time from their morning camp.” The beaten track was an advantage. Now, since the returning party had added a final touch to it, we laid aside our snowshoes and followed in the wake of the dogs, half the time at a jogging trot. In little more than an hour of this we came to the place where Montell had lost his dogs—and his followers. The huskies lay about the trodden campground, stiff in the snow. Scattered around the cleared circles where the tents had stood overnight were dishes, articles of food, bedding. Montell had discarded all but absolute essentials. A toboggan and its useless dog-harness stood upended, against a tree. “So much for loss of motive power,” Barreau said grimly. “It is a pity to leave all this, but we are loaded to the limit now. If we should lose our dogs——” he left the sentence unfinished. And so we passed by the abandoned goods and followed on the trail that led beyond. There is a marked difference between the path beaten through snow by seven persons with three full dog-teams, and that made by one man and a slight girl, dragging a toboggan by hand. Barreau took to his snowshoes again, and strode ahead. I kept the dogs crowding close on his heels. It was the time of year when, in that latitude, the hours of daylight numbered less than five. Thus it was but a brief span from noon to night. And nearing the gray hour of twilight he checked the straining huskies and myself with a gesture. Out of the woods ahead uprose the faint squeal of a toboggan-bottom sliding over the frosty snow. Barreau’s eyebrows drew together under his hood. “It’s a hundred to one that there will be fireworks the moment I’m recognized,” he muttered finally. “But I can see no other way. Come on.”