The Golden Snare

the place where the half-breed had seen Bram Johnson and his wolves in camp. Three days had passed since that exciting night, and when they arrived at the

ken the morning after the hunt, and Philip drew the point of his compa

all follow. You might add that much to what I have written to MacVeigh. But about the snare, Pierre Breaul

hing, M'sieu,"

y-pound pack, fitted snugly to his shoulders, were a three pound silk service-tent that was impervious to the fiercest wind, and an equal weight of cooking utensils. The rest of his burden, outside of his rifle, his Colt's revolver and his ammunition, was made up of rations, so much of which was scientifically compressed into dehydrated and powder form that he carried on his back,

self a fairly good judge in the matter, for once upon a time he thought that he was going to marry her. Strange why he should think of her now, he told himself; but for all that he could not get rid of her for a time. And thinking of her, his mind traveled back into the old days, even as he followed over the hidden trail of Bram. Undoubtedly a great many of his old friends had forgotten him. Five years was a long time, and friendship in the set to which he belonged was not famous for its longevity. Nor love, for that matter. Mignon had convinced

ungful of air, and forced it out again with a sound like steam escaping from a valve. The NORTH had done that for him; the north with its wonderful forests, its vast skies, its rivers, and its lakes, and its deep snows-the north that makes a man out of the husk of a man i

d he was. He had, at times, made efforts to discuss the quality of Bram's intelligence, but always he had failed to make others see and understand his point of view. By the Indians and half-breeds of the country in which he had lived, Bram was regarded as a monster of the first order possessed of the conjuri

more strongly to-day than it had last night. He had not given voice to that emotion, or to the thoughts it had roused, even to Pierre. Perhaps he was ridiculous. But he possessed imagination, and along with that a great deal of sympathy for animals-and some human beings. He had, for the time, ceased

golden hairs that had gone into the making of his snare; and that the snare itself might long have been carried as a charm against the evils of disease and the devil by the strange creat

let and examined it even more closely than last night. It might have come from a woman's head only yesterday, so bright and shimmery was it in the pale light of the midday

rren-the Great Barren of the unmapped north-was the great snow sea in which Bram had so long found safety from the law. Beaching five hundred miles east and west, and almost from the Sixtieth degree to the Arctic Ocean, its un-peopled and treeless wastes formed

Also he was determined to stick to the edge of the scrub timber, for if the Barren was Bram's retreat he would sooner or later strike a trail-unless Bram had gone straight out into

elf. For a week clear weather followed. It was intensely cold, but no sno

ith a fatalism born of superstition, knew would come to pass. And it is curious that on this night, and in the very hour of the stran