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The thought thrilled hi in the world had ever thrilled him before For the first time he sensed the vast difference between the hunter and the hunted, between the ame of life and death alone and the one who played it with the Law and all itsTo be hunted was led A different kind of fire burned in his brain He was the creature as at bay The other felloas the hunter now
He went back to theand leaned far out He looked at the forest and saith new eyes The glea for hi him then, would have sworn the fever had returned His eyes held a slu fire His face was flushed In thesethe iron bars of a prison His blood pulsed only to the stir of that greatest of all adventures which lay ahead of him He, the best man-hunter in two thousand miles of wilderness, would beat the hunters themselves The hound had turned fox, and that fox knew the tricks of both the hunter and the hunted He would win! A world beckoned to him, and he would reach the heart of that world Already there began to flash through his mind memory of the places where he could find safety and freedom for all time No man in all the Northland knew its out-of-the-way corners better than he--its unmapped and unexplored places, the far and nita, where the sun still rose and set without perhed as in the days when prehistoric monsters fed froh that ith the strength to travel, and the Law ht seek him for a hundred years without profit to itself
It was not bravado in his blood that stirred these thoughts It was not panic or an unsound excites even as he visioned theo down-river way, toward the Arctic And he would find Marette Radisson! Yes, even though she lived at Barracks at Fort Simpson, he would find her! And after that? The question blurred all other questions in histhat it would be fatal to his scheme if he were found on his feet, he returned to his bed The flush of his exertion and excitean came half an hour later