All about him the landscape swayed like mist; the suns danced indecent revel; specks and blotches, the beginning of snow-blindness, swam grotesquely projected into a world less real than they. Living things moved everywhere. Ordinarily the man paid no attention to them, knowing them for what they were, but once, warned by some deep and subtle instinct, he made the effort to clear his vision and saw a fox. By another miracle he killed it. The carcass he divided with his dog. He gave none of it to the girl.

By evening of the second day he had not yet overtaken his quarry. But the trail was evidently fresher, and the fox's meat gave him another chance. He slept, as before, with Mack the hound; and, as before, May-may-gwan crept in hours later to fall exhausted.

And over the three figures, lying as dead, the North whirred in the wind, waiting to stoop, triumphing, glorying that she had brought the boasts of men to nothing.



CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The next morning was the third day. There was no delay in getting started. All Dick had to do was to roll his blanket. He whirled on, still with his impetuous, fictitious vigour unimpaired. The girl staggered after him ten feet, then pitched forward. He turned uncertainly. She reached out to touch him. Her eyes said a farewell. It was the end.

Dick stood a moment, his eyes vague. Then mechanically he put his head down, mechanically he looked for the Trail, mechanically he shot away alone, alone except for the faithful, gaunt hound, the only thing that remained to him out of a whole world of living beings.

To his fevered vision the Trail was becoming fresher. Every step he took gave him the impression of so much gained, as though the man he was in pursuit of was standing still waiting to be taken. For the first time in months the conviction of absolute success took possession of him. His sight cleared, his heart beat strong, his whole being quivered with vigour. The illusion of the North faded away like a mist. The world was a flat plain of snow, with here and there a stunted spruce, knee-high, protruding above it, and with here and there an inequality of hidden bowlders and rounded knolls. Far off was the horizon, partially hidden in the normal snow-fog of this time of year. All objects were stationary, solid, permanent. Even the mock suns were only what was to be expected in so high a latitude. Dick was conscious of arguing these things to himself with extraordinary accuracy of logic. He proved a glow of happiness in the clarity of his brain, in the ease of his body, in the certainty of his success. The candle flared clear before its expiration.

For some moments he enjoyed this feeling of well-being, then a disturbing element insinuated itself. At first it was merely an uneasiness, which he could not place, a vague and nebulous irritation, a single crumpled rose-leaf. Then it grew to the proportions of a menace which banked his horizon with thunder, though the sun still shone overhead. Finally it became a terror, clutching him at the throat. He seemed to feel the need of identifying it. By an effort he recognised it as a lack. Something was missing without which there was for him no success, no happiness, no well-being, no strength, no existence. That something he must find. In the search his soul descended again to the region of dread, the regions of phantasmagoria. The earth heaved and rocked and swam in a sea of cold and glaring light. Strange creatures, momentarily changing shape and size, glided monstrous across the middle distance. The mock suns danced in the heavens.

Twice he stopped short and listened. In his brain the lack was defining itself as the lack of a sound. It was something he had always been used to. Now it had been taken away. The world was silent in its deprivation, and the silence stifled him. It had been something so usual that he had never noticed it; its absence called it to his attention for the first time. So far in the circle his mind ran; then swung back. He beat his forehead. Great as were the sufferings of his body, they were as nothing compared with these unreal torturings of his maddened brain.

For the third time he stopped, his head sidewise in the attitude of listening. At once easily, without effort, he knew. All these months behind him had sounded the crunch of snow-shoes. All these months about him, wrapping him so softly that he had never been conscious of it, had been the worship of a great devotion. Now they were taken away, he missed them. His spirit, great to withstand the hardships of the body, strong to deny itself, so that even at the last he had resisted the temptation of hunger and divided with his dog, in its weakened condition could not stand the exposure to the loneliness, to the barren winds of a peopleless world.

A long minute he stood, listening, demanding against all reason to hear the crunch, crunch, crunch that should tell him he was not alone. Then, without a glance at the Trail he had followed so long, he turned back.



CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The girl was lying face down as he had left her. Already the windrow of the snow was beginning to form, like the curve of a wave about to break over her prostrate body. He sat down beside her, and gathered her into his arms, throwing the thick three-point blanket with its warm lining over the bent forms of both. At once it was as though he had always been there, his back to the unceasing winds, a permanence in the wilderness. The struggles of the long, long trail withdrew swiftly into the past—they had never been. And through the unreality of this feeling shot a single illuminating shaft of truth: never would he find in himself the power to take the trail again. The bubbling fever-height of his energies suddenly drained away.

Mack, the hound, lay patiently at his feet. He, too, suffered, and he did not understand, but that did not matter; his faithfulness could not doubt. For a single instant it occurred to the young man that he might kill the dog, and so procure nourishment with which to extricate himself and the girl; but the thought drifted idly through his mind, and so on and away. It did not matter. He could never again follow that Trail, and a few days more or less—

The girl sighed and opened her eyes. They widened.

"Jibiwanisi!" she whispered.

Her eyes remained fixed on his face, puzzling out the mere facts. Then all at once they softened.

"You came back," she murmured.

Dick did not reply. He drew her a little closer into his arms.

For a long time they said nothing. Then the girl:

"It has come, Jibiwanisi, we must die," and after a moment, "You came back."

She closed her eyes again, happily.

"Why did you come back?" she asked after a while.

"I do not know," said Dick.

The snow sifted here and there like beach sand. Occasionally the dog shook himself free of it, but over the two human beings it flung, little by little, the whiteness of its uniformity, a warm mantle against the freezing. They became an integral part of the landscape, permanent as it, coeval with its rocks and hills, ancient as the world, a symbol of obscure passions and instincts and spiritual beauties old as the human race.

Abruptly Dick spoke, his voice harsh.

"We die here, Little Sister. I do not regret. I have done the best in me. It is well for me to die. But this is not your affair. It was not for you to give your life. Had you not followed you would now be warm in the wigwams of your people. This is heavy on my heart."

"Was it for this you came back to me?" she inquired.

Dick considered. "No," he replied.

"The south wind blows warm on me," she said, after a moment.

The man thought her mind wandered with the starvation, but this was not the case. Her speech had made one of those strange lapses into rhetoric so common to the savage peoples.

"Jibiwanisi," she went on solemnly, "to me now this is a land where the trees are green and the waters flow and the sun shines and the fat deer are in the grasses. My heart sings like the birds. What should I care for dying? It is well to die when one is happy."

"Are you happy, May-may-gwan?" asked Dick.

For answer she raised her eyes to his. Freed of the distraction of another purpose, clarified by the near approach of death, his spirit looked, and for the first time understood.

"May-may-gwan, I did not know," said he, awed.

He meant that he had not before perceived her love for him. She thought he had not before realised his love for her. Her own affection seemed to her as self-evident as the fact that her eyes were black.

"Yes, yes," she hastened to comfort what she supposed must be his distress, "I know. But you turned back."

She closed her eyes again and appeared to doze in a happy dream. The North swooped above them like some greedy bird of prey.

Gradually in his isolation and stillness Dick began to feel this. It grew on him little by little. Within a few hours, by grace of suffering and of imminent death, he came into his woodsman's heritage of imagination. Men like Sam Bolton gained it by patient service, by living, by the slow accumulations of years, but in essence it remained the same. Where before the young man had seen only the naked, material facts, now he felt the spiritual presence, the calm, ruthless, just, terrible Enemy, seeking no combat, avoiding none, conquering with a lofty air of predestination, inevitable, mighty. His eyes were opened, like the prophet's of old. The North hovered over him almost palpable. In the strange borderland of mingled illusion and reality where now he and starvation dwelt he thought sometimes to hear voices, the voices of his enemy's triumph.

"Is it done?" they asked him, insistently. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is your stubborn spirit at last bowed down, humiliated, crushed? Do you relinquish the prize,—and the struggle? Is it done?"

The girl stirred slightly in his arms. He focussed his eyes. Already the day had passed, and the first streamers of the aurora were crackling in the sky. They reduced this day, this year, this generation of men to a pin-point in time. The tragedy enacting itself on the snow amounted to nothing. It would soon be over: it occupied but one of many, many nights—wherein the aurora would crackle and shoot forth and ebb back in precisely the same deathful, living way, as though the death of it were the death in this world, but the life of it were a thing celestial and alien. The moment, to these three who perished the most important of all the infinite millions of millions that constitute time, was absolutely without special meaning to the wonderful, flaming, unearthly lights of the North.

Mack, the hound, lay in the position he had first assumed, his nose between his outstretched forepaws. So he had lain all that day and that night. So it seemed he must intend to lie until death took him. For on this dreadful journey Mack had risen above the restrictions imposed by his status as a zoological species, had ceased to be merely a dog, and by virtue of steadfastness, of loyalty, of uncomplaining suffering, had entered into the higher estate of a living being that has fearlessly done his best in the world before his call to leave it.

The girl opened her eyes.

"Jibiwanisi," she said, faintly, "the end is come."

Agonized, Dick forced himself to consciousness of the landscape. It contained moving figures in plenty. One after the other he brought them within the focus of scrutiny and dissolved them into thin air. If only the caribou herds—

He looked down again to meet her eyes.

"Do not grieve. I am happy, Jibiwanisi," she whispered.

After a little, "I will die first," and then, "This land and that—there must be a border. I will be waiting there. I will wait always. I will not go into the land until you come. I will wait to see it—with you. Oh, Jibiwanisi," she cried suddenly, with a strength and passion in startling contrast to her weakness. "I am yours, yours, yours! You are mine." She half raised herself and seized his two arms, searching his eyes with terror, trying to reassure herself, to drive off the doubts that suddenly had thronged upon her. "Tell me," she shook him by the arm.

"I am yours," Dick lied, steadily; "my heart is yours, I love you."

He bent and kissed her on the lips. She quivered and closed her eyes with a deep sigh.

Ten minutes later she died.



CHAPTER THIRTY

This was near the dawn of the fourth day. Dick remained always in the same attitude, holding the dead girl in his arms. Mack, the hound, lay as always, loyal, patient to the last. After the girl's departure the wind fell and a great stillness seemed to have descended on the world.

The young man had lost the significance of his position, had forgotten the snow and cold and lack of food, had forgotten even the fact of death which he was hugging to his breast. His powers, burning clear in the spirit, were concentrated on the changes taking place within himself. By these things the world of manhood was opened to him; he was no longer a boy. To most it comes as a slow growth. With him it was revelation. The completeness of it shook him to the foundations of life. He took no account of the certainty of his own destruction. It seemed to him, in the thronging of new impressions, that he might sit there forever, a buddha of contemplation, looking on the world as his maturity had readjusted it.

Never now could he travel the Silent Places as he had heretofore, stupidly, blindly, obstinately, unthinkingly, worse than an animal in perception. The wilderness he could front intelligently, for he had seen her face. Never now could he conduct himself so selfishly, so brutally, so without consideration, as though he were the central point of the system, as though there existed no other preferences, convictions, conditions of being that might require the readjustment of his own. He saw these others for the first time. Never now could he live with his fellow beings in such blindness of their motives and the passions of their hearts. His own heart, like a lute, was strung to the pitch of humanity. Never now could he be guilty of such harm as he had unthinkingly accomplished on the girl. His eyes were opened to human suffering. The life of the world beat through his. The compassion of the greater humanity came to him softly, as a gift from the portals of death. The full savour of it he knew at last, knew that finally he had rounded out the circle of his domain.

This was what life required of his last consciousness. Having attained to it, the greater forces had no more concern with him. They left him, a poor, weak, naked human soul exposed to the terrors of the North. For the first time he saw them in all their dreadfulness. They clutched him with the fingers of cruel suffering so that his body was wracked with the tortures of dissolution. They flung before his eyes the obscene, unholy shapes of illusion. They filled his ears with voices. He was afraid. He cowered down, covering his eyes with his forearms, and trembled, and sobbed, and uttered little moans. He was alone in the world, alone with enemies who had him in their power and would destroy him. He feared to look up. The man's spirit was broken. All the accumulated terrors which his resolute spirit had thrust from him in the long months of struggle, rushed in on him now that his guard was down. They rioted in the empty chambers of his soul.

"Is it done?" they shrieked in triumph. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is your spirit crushed? Is the victory ours? Is it done?"

Dick shivered and shrank as from a blow.

"Is it done?" the voices insisted. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is it done?"

The man shrieked aloud in agony.

"Oh, my God!" he cried. "Oh, yes, yes, yes! I am beaten. I can do nothing. Kill me. It is done."



CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

As though these words were a signal, Mack, the hound, who had up to now rested as motionless as though frozen to his place, raised himself on his haunches and gazed earnestly to the north.

In the distance Dick seemed to make out an object moving. As he had so often done before, by an effort he brought his eyes to focus, expecting, as also had happened so often before, that the object would disappear. But it persisted, black against the snow. Its outlines could not be guessed; its distance could not be estimated, its direction of travel could not be determined. Only the bare fact of its existence was sure. Somewhere out in the waste it, moving, antithesised these other three black masses on the whiteness, the living man, the living animal, the dead girl.

Dick variously identified it. At one moment he thought it a marten near at hand; then it became a caribou far away; then a fox between the two. Finally, instantaneously, as though at a bound it had leaped from indeterminate mists to the commonplace glare of every day, he saw it was a man.

The man was moving painfully, lifting each foot with an appearance of great effort, stumbling, staggering sideways from time to time as though in extreme weakness. Once he fell. Then he recovered the upright as though necklaced with great weights. His hands were empty of weapons. In the uncertainty of his movements he gradually approached.

Now Dick could see the great emaciation of his features. The bones of his cheeks seemed to press through his skin, which was leathery and scabbed and cracked to the raw from much frosting. His lips drew tight across his teeth, which grinned in the face of exhaustion like the travesty of laughter on a skull. His eyes were lost in the caverns of their sockets. His thin nostrils were wide, and through them and through the parted lips the breath came and went in strong, rasping gasps, audible even at this distance of two hundred paces. One live thing this wreck of a man expressed. His forces were near their end, but such of them as remained were concentrated in a determination to go on. He moved painfully, but he moved; he staggered, but he always recovered; he fell, and it was a terrible labour to rise, but always he rose and went on.

Dick Herron, sitting there with the dead girl across his knees, watched the man with a strange, detached curiosity. His mind had slipped back into its hazes. The world of phantasms had resumed its sway. He was seeing in this struggling figure a vision of himself as he had been, the self he had transcended now, and would never again resume. Just so he had battled, bringing to the occasion every last resource of the human spirit, tearing from the deeps of his nature the roots where life germinated and throwing them recklessly before the footsteps of his endeavour, emptying himself, wringing himself to a dry, fibrous husk of a man that his Way might be completed. His lips parted with a sigh of relief that this was all over. He was as an old man whose life, for good or ill, success or failure, is done, and who looks from the serenity of age on those who have still their youth to spend, their years to dole out day by day, painfully, in the intense anxiety of the moral purpose, as the price of life. In a spell of mysticism he sat there waiting.

The man plodded on, led by some compelling fate, to the one spot in the white immensity where were living creatures. When he had approached to within fifty paces, Dick could see his eyes. They were tight closed. As the young man watched, the other opened them, but instantly blinked them shut again as though he had encountered the searing of a white-hot iron. Dick Herron understood. The man had gone snow-blind.

And then, singularly enough for the first time, it was borne in on him who this man was, what was the significance of his return. Jingoss, the renegade Ojibway, the defaulter, the maker of the dread, mysterious Trail that had led them so far into this grim land, Jingoss was blind, and, imagining himself still going north, still treading mechanically the hopeless way of his escape, had become bewildered and turned south.

Dick waited, mysteriously held to inaction, watching the useless efforts of this other from the vantage ground of a wonderful fatalism,—as the North had watched him. The Indian plodded doggedly on, on, on. He entered the circle of the little camp. Dick raised his rifle and pressed its muzzle against the man's chest.

"Stop!" he commanded, his voice croaking harsh across the stillness.

The Indian, with a sob of mingled emotion, in which, strangely enough, relief seemed the predominant note, collapsed to the ground. The North, insistent on the victory but indifferent to the stake, tossed carelessly the prize at issue into the hands of her beaten antagonist.

And then, dim and ghostly, rank after rank, across the middle distance drifted the caribou herds.



CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was beyond the middle of summer. The day had been hot, but now the velvet night was descending. The canoe had turned into the channel at the head of the island on which was situated Conjuror's House. The end of the journey was at hand.

Dick paddled in the bow. His face had regained its freshness, but not entirely its former boyish roundness. The old air of bravado again sat his spirit—a man's nature persists to the end, and immortal and unquenchable youth is a gift of the gods—but in the depths of his strange, narrow eyes was a new steadiness, a new responsibility, the well-known, quiet, competent look invariably a characteristic of true woodsmen. At his feet lay the dog, one red-rimmed eye cocked up at the man who had gone down to the depths in his company.

The Indian Jingoss sat amidships, his hands bound strongly with buckskin thongs, a man of medium size, broad face, beady eyes with surface lights. He had cost much: he was to be given no chance to escape. Always his hands remained bound with the buckskin thongs, except at times when Dick or Sam stood over him with a rifle. At night his wrists were further attached to one of Sam's. Mack, too, understood the situation, and guarded as jealously as did his masters.

Sam wielded the steersman's paddle. His appearance was absolutely unaffected by this one episode in a long life.

They rounded the point into the main sweep of the east river, stole down along the bank in the gathering twilight, and softly beached their canoe below the white buildings of the Factory. With a muttered word of command to their captive, they disembarked and climbed the steepness of the low bluff to the grass-plot above. The dog followed at their heels.

Suddenly the impression of this year, until now so vividly a part of the present, was stricken into the past, the past of memory. Up to the very instant of topping the bluff it had been life; now it was experience.

For the Post was absolutely unchanged from that other summer evening of over a year ago when they had started out into the Silent Places. The familiarity of this fact, hitherto, for some strange reason, absolutely unexpected, reassured them their places in the normal world of living beings. The dead vision of the North had left in their spirits a residuum of its mysticism. Their experience of her power had induced in them a condition of mind when it would not have surprised them to discover the world shaken to its foundations, as their souls had been shaken. But here were familiar, peaceful things, unchanged, indifferent even to the passing of time. Involuntarily they drew a deep breath of relief, and, without knowing it, re-entered a sanity which had not been entirely theirs since the snows of the autumn before.

Over by the guns, indistinct in the falling twilight, the accustomed group of voyageurs and post-keepers were chatting, smoking, humming songs in the accustomed way. The low velvet band of forest against the sky; the dim squares of the log-houses punctuated with their dots of lamplight; the masses of the Storehouse, the stockade, the Factory; the long flag-staff like a mast against the stars; the constant impression of human life and activity,—these anodynes of accustomedness steadied these men's faith to the supremacy of human institutions.

On the Factory veranda could be dimly made out the figures of a dozen men. They sat silent. Occasionally a cigar glowed brighter for a moment, then dulled. Across a single square of subdued light the smoke eddied.

The three travellers approached, Sam Bolton in the lead, peering through the dusk in search of his chief. In a moment he made him out, sitting, as always, square to the world, his head sunk forward, his eyes gleaming from beneath the white tufts of his eyebrows. At once the woodsmen mounted the steps.

No one stirred or spoke. Only the smokers suspended their cigars in mid-air a few inches from their faces in the most perfect attitude of attention.

"Galen Albret," announced the old woodsman, "here is the Ojibway, Jingoss."

The Factor stirred slightly; his bulk, the significance of his features lost in obscurity.

"Me-en-gen!" he called, sharply.

The tall, straight figure of his Indian familiar glided from the dusk of the veranda's end.

"To-morrow at smoke time," commanded the Factor, using the Ojibway tongue, "let this man be whipped before the people, fifty lashes. Then let him be chained to the Tree for the space of one week, and let it be written above him in Ojibway and in Cree that thus Galen Albret punishes those who steal."

Without a word Me-en-gan took the defaulter by the arm and conducted him away.

Galen Albret had fallen into a profound silence, which no one ventured to break. Dick and Sam, uncertain as to whether or not they, too, were dismissed, shifted uneasily.

"How did you find him?" demanded the Factor, abruptly.

"We went with old Haukemah's band down as far as the Mattawishguia. There we left them and went up stream and over the divide. Dick here broke his leg and was laid up for near three months. I looked all that district over while he was getting well. Then we made winter travel down through the Kabinikagam country and looked her over. We got track of this Jingoss over near the hills, but he got wind of us and skipped when we was almost on top of him. We took his trail. He went straight north, trying to shake us off, and we got up into the barren country. We'd have lost him in the snow if it hadn't been for that dog there. He could trail him through new snow. We run out of grub up there, and finally I gave out. Dick here pushed on alone and found the Injun wandering around snow-blind. He run onto some caribou about that time, too, and killed some. Then he came back and got me:—I had a little pemmican and boiled my moccasins. We had lots of meat, so we rested up a couple of weeks, and then came back."

That was all. These men had done a great thing, and thus simply they told it. And they only told that much of it because it was their duty; they must report to their chief.

Galen Albret seemed for a moment to consider, as was his habit.

"You have done well," he pronounced at last. "My confidence in you was justified. The pay stands as agreed. In addition I place you in charge of the post at Lost River, and you, Herron, in charge of the Mattagami Brigade."

The men flushed, deeply pleased, more than rewarded, not by the money nor the advancement, but by the unqualified satisfaction of their commander.

They turned away. At this moment Virginia Albret, on some errand to her father, appeared outlined in slender youth against the doorway. On the instant she recognized them.

"Why, Sam and Dick," she said, "I am glad to see you. When did you get back?"

"Just back, Miss Virginia," replied Sam.

"That's good. I hope you've had a successful trip."

"Yes," answered Sam. The woodsman stood there a little awkwardly, wishing to be polite, not sure as to whether they should now go without further dismissal.

"See, Miss Virginia," hesitated Sam, to fill in the pause, "I have your handkerchief yet."

"I'm glad you kept it, Sam," replied the young girl; "and have you yours, Dick?"

And suddenly to Dick the contrast between this reality and that other came home with the vividness of a picture. He saw again the snow-swept plain, the wavering shapes of illusion, the mock suns dancing in unholy revel. The colour of the North burned before his eyes; a madness of the North unsealed his lips.

"I used it to cover a dead girl's face," he replied, bluntly.

The story had been as gray as a report of statistics,—so many places visited, so much time consumed. The men smoking cigars, lounging on cushioned seats in the tepid summer air, had listened to it unimpressed, as one listens to the reading of minutes of a gathering long past. This simple sentenced breathed into it life. The magnitude of the undertaking sprang up across the horizon of their comprehension. They saw between the mile-post markings of Sam Bolton's dry statements of fact, glimpses of vague, mysterious, and terrible deeds, indistinct, wonderful. The two before them loomed big in the symbolism of the wide world of men's endurance and determination and courage.

The darkness swallowed them before the group on the veranda had caught its breath. In a moment the voices about the cannon raised in greeting. A swift play of question and answer shot back and forth. "Out all the year?" "Where? Kabinikagam? Oh, yes, east of Brunswick Lake." "Good trip?" "That's right." "Glad of it." Then the clamour rose, many beseeching, one refusing. The year was done. These men had done a mighty deed, and yet a few careless answers were all they had to tell of it. The group, satisfied, were begging another song. And so, in a moment, just as a year before, Dick's rich, husky baritone raised in the words of the old melody. The circle was closed.

"There was an old darky, and his name was Uncle Ned, And he lived long ago, long ago—"

The night hushed to silence. Even the wolves were still, and the giddes down at the Indian camp ceased their endless quarrelling. Dick's voice had all the world to itself. The men on the Factory veranda smoked, the disks of their cigars dulling and glowing. Galen Albret, inscrutable, grim, brooded his unguessable thoughts. Virginia, in the doorway, rested her head pensively against one arm outstretched against the lintel.

"For there's no more work for poor old Ned, He's gone where the good darkies go."

The song finished. There succeeded the great compliment of quiet.

To Virginia it was given to speak the concluding word of this episode. She sighed, stretching out her arms.

"'The greatness of my people,'" she quoted softly.

THE END