Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/98

96 had picked apart this tribe more than once. But always they had drawn together again as an eddy draws straws, drifting north all the while. Yesterday word had come through by the Indian telegraph which flashes from mouth to mouth with curious speed that Abraham, the patriarch of the tribe, was sharpening knives and preparing to offer up some Isaacs to the God who walked the sky in the coloured Northern Lights which were to lead them into Canaan.

It was for Dick to discourage Abraham, and, what would probably be much more difficult, the tribe, and to bring back such members as he thought fit. Privately he sorrowed that the process could not be left to work itself to a legitimate conclusion by means of Abraham's knives; publicly he agreed with Tempest that there might be a big force to contend with; for the wild, hairy father of Israel had that quality which brought men to obey and follow him, and a khaki tunic and a few shiny buttons were not likely to prove of much weight there. But to Kennedy when he asked questions Dick said one thing only.

"When you've lived as long as I have you won't try to jump your fence till you come up right to it—and if you don't limber your ankles you'll get that stiff tendon before you know it."

Kennedy knew it that night when he hobbled in sharp agony through the hour of stern, breathless work, done in the eye and the teeth of the inclosing frost. Both men were red with hot young blood and sweating with labour; both wrenched from the dying day and the living cold every ounce they could get. But dark had shut down and the keen-toothed frost was on them before the tent had been pitched in the clearing shovelled out by the snow-shoes, and the big fire lit, and the rawhide lacings, now rigid as iron, beaten and bent from the sledge-covers, and the outfit brought in, and the frozen whitefish, threaded six on a stick, hung in the heat to thaw out for the dogs.

Dick took kettle and frying-pan and got supper, whistling softly, with his shadow treading about him like a giant with its head against the wall of black beyond the fire-circle. On the snowy rim of the circle sat the dogs,