He was going to the Winter camp of the people of Tillie, the squaw. The camp lay somewhere in the northwest. How far away he did not know; and it was no part of his plans to arrive at the camp of the Chippewas depleted in energy and resource. The role he had set out to play now called for the character of the Snow-Burner at his best—dominant, unconquerable. Therefore, when he found that his first efforts at speed threatened to cripple him with the treacherous snow-shoe cramp, he resigned himself to a pace which would have shamed him had he been in good condition. It was poor snow-shoeing, but at the end of an hour he had placed between himself and all possible sight of Hattie MacGregor the first ragged rock-ramparts of the Dead Lands, and he was content. On the western slope of a low ridge he unstrapped his snow-shoes and sat down on a bare boulder for a rest. His heart throbbed nervously from his exertion and his lungs gasped weakly. But with each breath of the crisp air his strength was coming back to him, and in his head the brains of the Snow-Burner worked as of old. He smiled with great self-satisfaction. He was not considering his condition, was not counting the difficulties that lay in his path. He was merely picturing, with lightning-like play of that powerful mental machinery of his, the desperate nature of the adventure toward which he was travelling. It was desperate enough even to thrill Hell-Camp Reivers. For probably never did born adventurer set forth of his own free will on a more deadly, more hopeless-looking trail. As he sat on the rock there in the Dead Lands, Reivers was in better condition than on his flight from Cameron-Dam Camp to this extent: the bullet-hole in his shoulder was healed, and, he had recuperated from the fever brought on by exposure and exhaustion. That was all. He was still the bare man with empty hands. He possessed nothing in the world but the clothes he stood in, the food on his back and the gift snow-shoes on his feet. He had not even a knife that might be called a weapon, for the case-knife that old MacGregor had given him upon parting could scarcely be reckoned such. In this condition he was setting forth—first, to find a cunningly hidden mine; second, to take it and keep it for his own from one Shanty Moir, who treated his henchmen like dogs and was looked up to as a chieftain. The Snow-Burner lived again as he contemplated the possibilities of a clash with Moir. If what the MacGregors had said was true, Shanty Moir was a boss man himself. And as instinctively and eagerly as one ten-pronged buck tears straight through timber, swamp and water to battle with another buck whose deep-voiced challenge proclaims him similarly a giant, so Reivers was going toward Shanty Moir.