On they struggled beside the Rail, but now hope ran high. Bennie sang and whistled, unmindful of the mosquitoes and black flies that renewed their attacks with unremitting ferocity. The sun lowered itself into the pine trees, shooting dazzling shafts through the low branches, and then sank in a welter of crimson-yellow light. The sky turned gray in the east; faint stars twinkled through the quivering waves that still shook from the overheated rocks. It turned cold and the mosquitoes departed. Hugging the Rail, they staggered on, now over shaking muskeg, now through thickets of tangled brush, now on great ledges of barren rock, and then across caribou barrens knee-deep in dry and crackling moss. Darkness fell and prudence dictated that they should make camp. But in their excitement they trudged on, until presently a pale glow behind the dwarfed trees showed that the moon was rising. They boiled the water, made tea, and cooked some biscuits. Soon they could see to pursue their way. "'Most there now," encouraged Marc. Presently, instead of descending, they found the land was rising again, and forcing their way through the undergrowth they struggled up a rocky hillside, perhaps three hundred feet in height. Marc was in the lead, with Bennie a few feet behind him. As they reached the crest the Indian turned and pointed to something in front of him that Bennie was unable to distinguish. "_Nous sommes arrivees_," he announced. With his heart thumping from the exertion of the climb, Bennie crawled up beside his guide and found himself confronted by a strong barbed-wire entanglement affixed to iron stanchions firmly imbedded in the rocks. They were on the top of a ridge that dropped away abruptly at their feet into a valley, perhaps a mile in width, terminating on the other side in perpendicular cliffs, estimated by Bennie to be about eight hundred or a thousand feet in height. Although the entanglement was by no means impassable, it was a distinct obstacle and one they preferred to tackle by daylight. Moreover, it indicated that their company was undesired. They were in the presence of an unknown quantity, the master of the Flying Ring. Whether he was a malign or a benevolent influence, this Father of the Marionettes, they could not tell.