Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. James Oliver Curwood

it was the woman's face. Then a door opened, and a figure hurried across the open. He stepped back into the gloom of his own cabin and waited. It was the colonel. Three times he knocked loudly at the cabin door.

      “I'd like to go out and shake his hand,” muttered Steele. “I'd like to tell him that he isn't the only man who's had an idol broken, and that Mrs. B.'s little flirtation isn't a circumstance—to what might have happened.”

      Instead, he moved silently away, and turned his face into the thin trail that buried itself in the black forests of the West.