For a long time he did not sleep.  He listened to the crackle of the fire.  Again and again he heard that monster voice moaning and shrieking over the forest.  Never had the rage of storm filled him with the uneasiness of to-night.  At last the mystery of it was solved for him.  The wind came and went each time in a great moaning, half shrieking sound:  B-r-r-r-r—­e-e-e-e—­aw-w-w-w!

It was like a shock to him; and yet, he was not a superstitious man.  No, he was not that.  He would have staked his life on it.  But it was not pleasant to hear a dead man’s name shrieked over one’s head by the wind.  Under the cover of his sleeping-bag flap Corporal Blake laughed.  Funny things were always happening, he tried to tell himself.  And this was a mighty good joke.  Breault wasn’t so slow, after all.  He had given his promise, and he was keeping it; for, if it wasn’t really Breault’s voice up there in the wind, multiplied a thousand times, it was a good imitation of it.  Again Corporal Blake laughed—­a laugh as unpleasant as the cough that had come from Breault’s bullet-punctured lung.  He fell asleep after a time; but even sleep could not drive from him the clinging obsession of the thought that strange things were to happen in this taking of Jan Thoreau.

With the gray dawn there was nothing to mark the passing of the storm except freshly fallen snow, and Blake was on the trail before it was light enough to see a hundred yards ahead.  There was a defiance and a contempt of last night in the crack of his long caribou-gut whip and the halloo of his voice as he urged on his dogs.  Breault’s voice in the wind?  Bah!  Only a fool would have thought that.  Therefore he was a fool.  And Jan Thoreau—­it would be like taking a child.  There would be no happenings to report—­merely an arrest, a quick return journey, an affair altogether too ordinary to be interesting.  Perhaps it was all on account of the hearty supper of caribou liver he had eaten.  He was fond of liver, and once or twice before it had played him tricks.

He began to wonder if he would find Jan Thoreau at home.  He remembered Jan quite vividly.  The Indians called him Kitoochikun because he played a fiddle.  Blake, the Iron Man, disliked him because of that fiddle.  Jan was never without it, on the trail or off.  The Fiddling Man, he called him contemptuously—­a baby, a woman; not fit for the big north.  Tall and slim, with blond hair in spite of his French blood and name, a quiet and unexcitable face, and an air that Blake called “damned superiority.”  He wondered how the Fiddling Man had ever screwed up nerve enough to kill Breault.  Undoubtedly there had been no fight.  A quick and treacherous shot, no doubt.  That was like a man who played a fiddle.  Poof!  He had no more respect for him than if he dressed in woman’s clothing.

And he did have a wife, this Jan Thoreau.  They lived a good twenty miles off the north-and-south trail, on an island in the middle of Black Bear Lake.  He had never seen the wife.  A poor sort of woman, he made up his mind, that would marry a fiddler.  Probably a half-breed; maybe an Indian.  Anyway, he had no sympathy for her.  Without a doubt, it was the woman who did the trapping and cut the wood.  Any man who would tote a fiddle around on his back—­