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Just why he wanted the information he was after, he could not have told himself It was a pet aphorism between O'Connor and him that they had often traveled to success on the backs of their hunches And his proposition to Mercer was made on the spur of one of thosehad been one of unexpected excitement, and now he leaned back in an effort to review it and to forget, if he could, the distressing thing that was bound to happen to hiet away fro on hiet sufficient air into his lungs

He found hiht return For a long tiruous and in bad taste that fate should have left this adventure for his last If he had o--or even three--it was probable that she would so have changed the events of life for hiot the half-breed's bullet in his chest He confessed the thing unblushingly The wilderness had taken the place of woman for hi beyond its wild freedoames of chance He had dreamed, as every man dreams, but realities and not the dreairl had coain her hair and eyes, the slimness of her as she had stood at the , the freedoth of that slender body, the poise of her exquisite head, and he felt again the thrill of her hand and the still more wonderful thrill of her lips as she had pressed them warht that overwhelht have told him an untruth He was confident, if he lived until tomorrow, that Mercer would corroborate his faith in her He had never heard of a place called the Valley of Silent Men, but it was a big country, and Fort Simpson with its Hudson Bay Company's post and its half-dozen shacks was a thousand miles away He was not sure that such a place as that valley really existed It was easier to believe that the girl's home was at Fort Providence, Fort Simpson, Fort Good Hope, or even at Fort McPherson It was not difficult for hihter of one of the factor lords of the North Yet this, upon closer consideration, he gave up as unreasonable The word "Fort" did not stand for population, and there were probably not more than fifty white people at all the posts between the Great Slave and the Arctic She was not one of these, or the fact would have been known at the Landing