“I’m comin’ to that. One time it seemed ’sif the blow was goin’ to spoil our chances, for it drifted the trail over; but it headed Groche off, too. He knew he couldn’t buck a blizzard. So, finally, he give up and made a ’bout face. We three’d separated--spread out, you know--lookin’ for his tracks. So there wa’n’t nobody with me when, all of a sudden, I clumb over a little rise, and there was Mr. Peter leggin’ it before the wind for all he was wuth. And I was right atop of him, ’most. And then I got this.” And Lon touched the cut in his coat. “But you had a pistol, hadn’t you?” Lon’s smile was grim. “Kane had seen that I was heeled proper, but I’d sot my heart on roundin’ up my man without makin’ a sieve of him. Why, I’d even took a rope along to hog-tie him. So I didn’t shoot. I jest clubbed the revolver and patted him over the head with it till the butt broke off. By that time, though, he was ready to quit.” “Great Scott, but what a fight it must have been!” “Wal, ’twas quite some. What with him tryin’ to carve me up, and me doin’ a bass drum solo on his head--oh, wal, you can figger out as well as I can what happened. I was too busy to be takin’ picters. But I’ll say this for him: he fit like a wildcat.” “How about your end of it?” Lon shook his head. “Sam, I’m a man o’ peace. And I got enough of the other thing to-day to last me till I’m ninety-eight and come into my second wind. But that’s all I know about the scrap.” For a space nobody spoke. Every one of the boys was picturing for himself that desperate grapple of two strong men, struggling for mastery in the midst of the raging storm. “But afterward--after you’d downed him--what happened?” queried Sam at last. “Mighty little--for a while. I was hopin’ the lumberjacks, missin’ me, would scout back and pick us up, but they didn’t come. Reckon they were havin’ troubles o’ their own. Finally, seein’ as how keepin’ still meant freezin’, I tried to work toward the camp. But bless you, boys! it wa’n’t no use; I couldn’t find my own tracks. And I’d got all tangled on direction. So I reasoned with Groche for a spell--he knows them woods better’n he knows any book. I roped him the way he’s fixed now, and told him, ‘Giddap! Le’s go somewhere.’” “And then----?” Sam urged. “Yes; tell us!” chimed in two or three of the others. Thus encouraged, Lon told his story, and a strange story it was of captive forced to guide captor; of slow and painful plodding through growing drifts; of halts in the lee of wood or hill, while the storm increased, and the wind blew more fiercely, and the cold deepened. After a time he felt sure that Groche, while avoiding the camp, had some other refuge in mind. “He’s brute enough,” Lon explained, “to have the brute’s instinct for makin’ for a burrow. So I give him his head, and let him go it.”