more easily.  At the end of half an hour Father Roland halted the team again to give him a “winding” spell.  Baree had come nearer.  He was not more than a quarter of a mile behind.  It was three o’clock when they struck off the lake into the edge of the forest to the northwest.  The sun had grown cold and pale.  The snow crystals no longer sparkled so furiously.  In the forest there was gathering a gray, silent gloom.  They halted again in the edge of that gloom.  The Missioner slipped off his mittens and filled his pipe with fresh tobacco.  The pipe fell from his fingers and buried itself in the soft snow at his feet.  As he bent down for it Father Roland said quite audibly: 

“Damn!”

He was smiling when he rose.  David, also, was smiling.

“I was thinking,” he said—­as though the other had demanded an explanation of his thoughts—­“what a curious man of God you are, mon Pere!”

The Little Missioner chuckled, and then he muttered, half to himself as he lighted the tobacco, “True—­very true.”  When the top of the bowl was glowing, he added:  “How are your legs?  It is still a good mile to the shack.”

“I am going to make it or drop,” declared David.

He wanted to ask a question.  It had been in his mind for some time, and he burned with a strange eagerness to have it answered.  He looked back, and saw Baree circling slowly over the surface of the lake toward the forest.  Casually he inquired: 

“How far is it to Tavish’s, mon Pere?”

“Four days,” said the Missioner.  “Four days, if we make good time, and another week from there to God’s Lake.  I have paid Tavish a visit in five days, and once Tavish made God’s Lake in two days and a night with seven dogs.  Two days and a night!  Through darkness he came—­darkness and a storm.  That is what fear will do, David.  Fear drove him.  I have promised to tell you about it to-night.  You must know, to understand him.  He is a strange man—­a very strange man!”

He spoke to Mukoki in Cree, and the Indian responded with a sharp command to the dogs.  The huskies sprang from their bellies and strained forward in their traces.  The Cree picked his way slowly ahead of them.  Father Roland dropped in behind him.  Again David followed the sledge.  He was struck with wonder at the suddenness with which the sun had gone out.  In the thick forest it was like the beginning of night.  The deep shadows and darkly growing caverns of gloom seemed to give birth to new sounds.  He heard the whit, whit, whit, of something close to him, and the next moment a great snow owl flitted like a ghostly apparition over his head; he heard the patter of snow as it fell from the bending limbs; from out of a patch of darkness two trees, rubbing slightly against each other, emitted a shivering wail that startled him—­it had seemed so like the cry of a child.  He was straining his ears so tensely to hear, and his eyes to see, that he forgot the soreness of his knees and ankles.  Now and then the dogs stopped while Mukoki and the Missioner dragged a log or a bit of brushwood from their path.  During one of these intervals there came to them, from a great distance, a long, mournful howl.