His eye saw nothing in the blackness.

For a few moments the question he had asked himself obliterated everything.

If they found Joanne's husband alive at Tete Jaune--what then?
He turned back, retracing his steps over the trail, a feeling of resentment--of hatred for the man he had never seen--slowly taking the place of the oppressive thing that had turned his heart sick within him.

Then, in a flash, came the memory of Joanne's words--words in which, white-faced and trembling, she had confessed that her anxiety was not that she would find him dead, but that _she would find him alive_.

A joyous thrill shot through him as he remembered that.