of steel traveling over frozen snow.  Beyond these sounds there were no others, with, the exception of his own breath and the beating of his own heart.  Mile after mile of the Coppermine dropped behind them.  The last tree and the last fringe of bushes disappeared, and to the east, the north, and the west there was no break in the vast emptiness of the great Arctic plain.  Ever afterward the memory of that night seemed like a grotesque and horrible dream to him.  Looking back, he could remember how the moon sank out of the sky and utter darkness closed them in and how through that darkness he urged on the tired dogs, tugging with them at the lead-trace, and stopping now and then in his own exhaustion to put his arms about Celie and repeat over and over again that everything was all right.

After an eternity the dawn came.  What there was to be of day followed swiftly, like the Arctic night.  The shadows faded away, the shores loomed up and the illimitable sweep of the plain lifted itself into vision as if from out of a great sea of receding fog.  In the quarter hour’s phenomenon between the last of darkness and wide day Philip stood straining his eyes southward over the white path of the Coppermine.  It was Celie, huddled close at his side, who turned her eyes first from the trail their enemies would follow.  She faced the north, and the cry that came from her lips brought Philip about like a shot.  His first sensation was one of amazement that they had not yet passed beyond the last line of timber.  Not more than a third of a mile distant the river ran into a dark strip of forest that reached in from the western plain like a great finger.  Then he saw what Celie had seen.  Close up against the timber a spiral of smoke was rising into the air.  He made out in another moment the form of a cabin, and the look in Celie’s staring face told him the rest.  She was sobbing breathless words which he could not understand, but he knew that they had won their race, and that it was Armin’s place.  And Armin was not dead.  He was alive, as Blake had said—­and it was about breakfast time.  He had held up under the tremendous strain of the night until now—­ and now he was filled with an uncontrollable desire to laugh.  The curious thing about it was that in spite of this desire no sound came from his throat.  He continued to stare until Celie turned to him and swayed into his arms.  In the moment of their triumph her strength was utterly gone.  And then the thing happened which brought the life back into him again with a shock.  From far up the black finger of timber where it bellied over the horizon of the plain there floated down to them a chorus of sound.  It was a human sound—­the yapping, wolfish cry of an Eskimo horde closing in on man or beast.  They had heard that same cry close on the heels of the fight in the clearing.  Now it was made by many voices instead of two or three.  It was accompanied almost instantly by the clear, sharp report of a rifle, and a moment later the single shot was followed by a scattering fusillade.  After that there was silence.