there flashed a flicker of doubt. Could this after all be the work of a devil in brute shape? But the Frenchman's head was hard, and grasping his rifle he continued on.
For some time the night had been free from the voice, when, as he approached his second deadfall, the wail again rose from the lower shoulder of the ridge down the valley. But, as it lifted in volume to the maniacal scream, it ceased abruptly, as if choked off by some giant hand.
Hertel found the remaining deadfalls in similar condition to the first. The tracks on the snow told the same story. The ponderous engines of destruction had been rendered harmless from the outside by the crafty thief.
There was one hope left—the toothed jaws of steel hidden in the snow at the end of the marten line. He would go to them at once and take up the trail from there.
The cold was increasing. Deeper and deeper bit the fangs of the frost. His eyebrows and mustache were a mass of ice. Time and again all feeling left his toes under the thongs of his shoes, and he swung his gun from mittened hand to hand to keep up circulation. The boom of the riven river-ice and the snap of the timber alone violated the white silence under the star-incrusted sky.
The lone runner in the forest approached the first of his bear-traps at the marten cabanes. If the hairy thief had escaped these, little hope remained of running him down that night in this withering air which
