Hot tears of disappointment blurred the youngster's eyes and trickled down his cheeks--he had forgotten to load the rifle, and his hands trembled as he hurriedly jammed the long, flask-shaped cartridges into the magazine and followed down to the river on the trail of the big cat. He remembered as he mushed along on his small rackets that Bill had told him of a rocky ledge some five or six miles below camp, and had promised to take him to this place where the _loup-cerviers_ had their dens among the rocks. The trail held to the river, whose banks rose more abruptly as he proceeded, and at length, as he rounded a sharp bend, he could make out dimly through the thickening air the outline of a high rocky bluff; but even as he looked, the ledge was blotted out by a quick flurry of snow, and from high among the tree-tops came a long, wailing moan of wind. The trees pitched wildly in the icy blast; the moan increased to a mighty roar, and the air was thick with flying snow. Not the soft, flaky snow of the previous storm, but particles fine as frozen fog, that bit and stung as they whirled against his face in the eddying gusts that came from no direction at all and every direction at once. The boy bowed his head to the storm and pushed steadily forward--he _must_ kill the _loup-cervier_, whose trail was growing momentarily more indistinct. His eyes could penetrate but a few yards into the white smother, and suddenly the dark wall of the rock ledge loomed in front of him, and the trail, almost obliterated now, turned sharply and disappeared between two huge, upstanding bowlders. CHAPTER XLI THE BLIZZARD At eleven o'clock in the morning Bill Carmody ordered his teams to the stables. At twelve o'clock, when the men crowded into the grub-shack, the air was filled with fine particles of flinty snow, and the roar of the wind through the pine-tops was the mighty roar of the surf of a pounding sea. At one o'clock the boss called "gillon," and with loud shouts and rough horse-play, the men made a rush for the bunk-house. At two o'clock Daddy Dunnigan thrust his head through the doorway of the shop where Bill, under the blacksmith's approving eye, was completing a lesson in the proper welding of the broken link of a log chain. With a mysterious quirk of the head he motioned the foreman to follow, and led the way to the cook-shack, where Blood River Jack waited with lowering brow. "D'yez happin to know is th' b'y up yonder?" asked the old Irishman, with a jerk of his thumb in the direction of the house. Bill beat the dry snow from his clothing as he stared from one to the other. "The boy!" he cried. "What do you mean? Come--out with it--_quick_!" "It is that my rifle and belt have gone from under the bunk," Blood River Jack answered. "They were taken while I slept. The boy did not come to dinner in the grub-shack. Is it that he eats to-day with his people?" "Good Lord! I don't know! Haven't you seen him, Daddy?"