Page:Toilers of the Trails.djvu/204

 cut the lungs like thrusts of a knife. Rounding a thicket of low spruce, Hertel sighted the trap. Like a flash the hunter dropped to his knees, cocked rifle at his shoulder. One, two, three seconds his eye held his sights lined on a black shape by the cabane. But the mass on the snow was motionless. Then, rising, Hertel stealthily moved forward, rifle ready. Suspicious, he stopped a hundred feet from the trap, peering long at the spectacle before him, then slowly shook his head. With rifle thrust forward and every nerve tense, Hertel approached the trap. Was his enemy in his power at last, or was he being lured into some fiendish ambuscade? He glanced quickly to the side and rear. There was nothing there. The shape in the snow did not stir. Then he walked deliberately to the trap.

"By Gar!"

The Frenchman stared at the hairy bulk crushed in the grip of the merciless steel jaws.

He touched the thing with his snow-shoe. It was frozen stiff.

With a wrench he turned the heavy trap and its victim over—to stare into the swart face, hideous in its grimace of death, of a Cree Indian.