that, then? Tempest looked at Ducane sitting bluff and heavily jovial against those delicate porteres. He looked at Jennifer, down on her knees in the glow of the open fire, laughing as she quarreled with Slicker over her toast-making; and he looked at Dick, drawn a little apart, with one foot over his knee and that shadow of absorbed contemplation shut down on his lean brown face. Tempest had known that look well, once. Dick's sleuth-hound mind was on the trail again; here, in Ducane's own house; here, where that little laughing wife was to betray the husband.
He stood up with the pulses closing in his throat. It had not seemed like that before; not until he had put it outside his own control by giving it into Dick's. What was it Molson had said of Dick?
"You can't whip him off a trail once he has sensed it."
If Tempest had forgotten that from the old days he knew it again with one look at that brooding face. But he knew that when he got Dick alone he would try to do it.
The horror of the thing made his hand cold when it closed on Jennifer's and his voice stammered.
"Well—I had forgotten. I arranged to meet Randal from the Portage before he went back. Why, yes; Dick can stay if you'll keep him. I'll walk, and I imagine I'll get there as soon, for the new snow has made the surface bad for sleighing—and it's only a couple of miles, anyway."
His senses were buzzing when he got out the raw grey day, and the bleak wind and the weight of snow on the earth seemed to lie on his heart also. For the first time in his life he felt utterly alone; stunned with beating his head against that awful mystery of the Why; broken-finger-nailed with struggling to pick the lock of it; blind with the long strain of trying to see through it.
A priest went by, wrapped like a stone god on his sleigh, with twinkling eyes only clear. He overtook a half-breed woman and carried her load for her until she turned up a side-trail to her shack. And then only the wind crying in the forest and the patter of the blowing
