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244 something of the craven spirit of its master seemed to possess it and it endeavoured to lie down. Slicker got off and explained his own desires with the whip-butt, and Grange helped him. But before the pony had made his choice of the two evils Grange spoke, and his usual giggle was high and weak.

"I guess they've cut it," he said.

Slicker looked round. The muskeg was like a room with four irregular grey walls. There were neither doors nor windows to that room, nor any sound in it but the far-off sound of the windy fire running in the trees. He turned his startled blue eyes on Grange's inefficient little face, and curbed the words on his tongue.

"Well, we're all right. The muskeg won't burn."

"But we can't git out. An' the smoke may come over. An' we got no food—an' no nothing."

"Dick will come back for us," said Slicker. And then his heart said it again, with a sudden shock of surprise. He believed that he hated and mistrusted Dick. He knew that he had shown Dick all the insolence in his power. And yet he knew quite certainly that this man who had betrayed Jennifer's confidence; who was playing a double game with Tempest; who never upheld the honour of the Law he served one whit more than he had to—he knew that this man would come back through the fire to find them. Why he knew he could not explain; and because this vexed him he unsaddled the pony and invited it to lie down, and hammered it again with the whip-butt because it wouldn't.

The trail into Halliday's Rift was an evil one to the men who followed Dick that day. East and west the fire was eating into the forest with fierce, swift jaws; snapping at tall trees and passing on with reddened dripping fangs. Down open galleries the smoke was thinned by the clear shimmer of heat, and where little fires ran rapidly in the undergrowth came crackling noises that sounded like detached grace-notes on the huge roaring body of sound. The smoke blew across them; blotting out sense and sound. It lifted, showing spouts of flame against the tall canopy of black. And then they stumbled on burnt and broken timber, hot and tangled, and flaming yet here and there;