In a Far Country
When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to
forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such
customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must
abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must
reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been
shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability,
the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but
to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were
created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable,
and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions
which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and
react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes.
It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new
groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he
will surely die.
The man who turns his back upon the comforts of an elder
civilization, to face the savage youth, the primordial simplicity
of the North, may estimate success at an inverse ratio to the
quantity and quality of his hopelessly fixed habits. He will soon
discover, if he be a fit candidate, that the material habits are
the less important. The exchange of such things as a dainty menu
for rough fare, of the stiff leather shoe for the soft, shapeless
moccasin, of the feather bed for a couch in the snow, is after
all a very easy matter. But his pinch will come in learning
properly to shape his mind's attitude toward all things, and
especially toward his fellow man. For the courtesies of ordinary
life, he must substitute unselfishness, forbearance, and
tolerance. Thus, and thus only, can he gain that pearl of great
price--true comradeship. He must not say 'thank you'; he must
mean it without opening his mouth, and prove it by responding in
kind. In short, he must substitute the deed for the word, the
spirit for the letter.
When the world rang with the tale of Arctic gold, and the lure of
the North gripped the heartstrings of men, Carter Weatherbee
threw up his snug clerkship, turned the half of his savings over
to his wife, and with the remainder bought an outfit. There was
no romance in his nature--the bondage of commerce had crushed all
that; he was simply tired of the ceaseless grind, and wished to
risk great hazards in view of corresponding returns. Like many
another fool, disdaining the old trails used by the Northland
pioneers for a score of years, he hurried to Edmonton in the
spring of the year; and there, unluckily for his soul's welfare,
he allied himself with a party of men.
There was nothing unusual about this party, except its plans.
Even its goal, like that of all the other parties, was the
Klondike. But the route it had mapped out to attain that goal
took away the breath of the hardiest native, born and bred to the
vicissitudes of the Northwest. Even Jacques Baptiste, born of a
Chippewa woman and a renegade voyageur (having raised his first
whimpers in a deerskin lodge north of the sixty-fifth parallel,
and had the same hushed by blissful sucks of raw tallow), was
surprised. Though he sold his services to them and agreed to
travel even to the never-opening ice, he shook his head ominously
whenever his advice was asked.
Percy Cuthfert's evil star must have been in the ascendant, for
he, too, joined this company of argonauts. He was an ordinary
man, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is saying
a good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture--no
reason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormal
development of sentimentality. He mistook this for the true
spirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done the
like, and made as fatal a mistake.
The first break-up of spring found the party following the
ice-run of Elk River. It was an imposing fleet, for the outfit
was large, and they were accompanied by a disreputable contingent
of half-breed voyageurs with their women and children. Day in and
day out, they labored with the bateaux and canoes, fought
mosquitoes and other kindred pests, or sweated and swore at the
portages. Severe toil like this lays a man naked to the very
roots of his soul, and ere Lake Athabasca was lost in the south,
each member of the party had hoisted his true colors.
The two shirks and chronic grumblers were Carter Weatherbee and
Percy Cuthfert. The whole party complained less of its aches and
pains than did either of them. Not once did they volunteer for
the thousand and one petty duties of the camp. A bucket of water
to be brought, an extra armful of wood to be chopped, the dishes
to be washed and wiped, a search to be made through the outfit
for some suddenly indispensable article--and these two effete
scions of civilization discovered sprains or blisters requiring
instant attention.
They were the first to turn in at night, with score of tasks yet
undone; the last to turn out in the morning, when the start
should be in readiness before the breakfast was begun.
They were the first to fall to at mealtime, the last to have a
hand in the cooking; the first to dive for a slim delicacy, the
last to discover they had added to their own another man's share.
If they toiled at the oars, they slyly cut the water at each
stroke and allowed the boat's momentum to float up the blade.
They thought nobody noticed; but their comrades swore under their
breaths and grew to hate them, while Jacques Baptiste sneered
openly and damned them from morning till night. But Jacques
Baptiste was no gentleman.
At the Great Slave, Hudson Bay dogs were purchased, and the fleet
sank to the guards with its added burden of dried fish and
pemican. Then canoe and bateau answered to the swift current of
the Mackenzie, and they plunged into the Great Barren Ground.
Every likely-looking 'feeder' was prospected, but the elusive
'pay-dirt' danced ever to the north. At the Great Bear, overcome
by the common dread of the Unknown Lands, their voyageurs began
to desert, and Fort of Good Hope saw the last and bravest bending
to the towlines as they bucked the current down which they had so
treacherously glided.
Jacques Baptiste alone remained. Had he not sworn to travel even
to the never-opening ice? The lying charts, compiled in main from
hearsay, were now constantly consulted.
And they felt the need of hurry, for the sun had already passed
its northern solstice and was leading the winter south again.
Skirting the shores of the bay, where the Mackenzie disembogues
into the Arctic Ocean, they entered the mouth of the Little Peel
River. Then began the arduous up-stream toil, and the two
Incapables fared worse than ever. Towline and pole, paddle and
tumpline, rapids and portages--such tortures served to give the
one a deep disgust for great hazards, and printed for the other a
fiery text on the true romance of adventure. One day they waxed
mutinous, and being vilely cursed by Jacques Baptiste, turned, as
worms sometimes will. But the half-breed thrashed the twain, and
sent them, bruised and bleeding, about their work. It was the
first time either had been manhandled.
Abandoning their river craft at the headwaters of the Little
Peel, they consumed the rest of the summer in the great portage
over the Mackenzie watershed to the West Rat. This little stream
fed the Porcupine, which in turn joined the Yukon where that
mighty highway of the North countermarches on the Arctic Circle.
But they had lost in the race with winter, and one day they tied
their rafts to the thick eddy-ice and hurried their goods ashore.
That night the river jammed and broke several times; the
following morning it had fallen asleep for good. 'We can't be
more'n four hundred miles from the Yukon,' concluded Sloper,
multiplying his thumb nails by the scale of the map. The council,
in which the two Incapables had whined to excellent disadvantage,
was drawing to a close.
'Hudson Bay Post, long time ago. No use um now.' Jacques
Baptiste's father had made the trip for the Fur Company in the
old days, incidentally marking the trail with a couple of frozen
toes.
Sufferin' cracky!' cried another of the party. 'No whites?' 'Nary
white,' Sloper sententiously affirmed; 'but it's only five
hundred more up the Yukon to Dawson. Call it a rough thousand
from here.' Weatherbee and Cuthfert groaned in chorus.
'How long'll that take, Baptiste?' The half-breed figured for a
moment. 'Workum like hell, no man play out, ten--twenty--forty
--fifty days. Um babies come' (designating the Incapables), 'no
can tell. Mebbe when hell freeze over; mebbe not then.' The
manufacture of snowshoes and moccasins ceased. Somebody called the
name of an absent member, who came out of an ancient cabin at the
edge of the campfire and joined them. The cabin was one of the
many mysteries which lurk in the vast recesses of the North. Built
when and by whom, no man could tell.
Two graves in the open, piled high with stones, perhaps contained
the secret of those early wanderers. But whose hand had piled the
stones? The moment had come. Jacques Baptiste paused in the
fitting of a harness and pinned the struggling dog in the snow.
The cook made mute protest for delay, threw a handful of bacon
into a noisy pot of beans, then came to attention. Sloper rose to
his feet. His body was a ludicrous contrast to the healthy
physiques of the Incapables. Yellow and weak, fleeing from a
South American fever-hole, he had not broken his flight across
the zones, and was still able to toil with men. His weight was
probably ninety pounds, with the heavy hunting knife thrown in,
and his grizzled hair told of a prime which had ceased to be. The
fresh young muscles of either Weatherbee or Cuthfert were equal
to ten times the endeavor of his; yet he could walk them into the
earth in a day's journey. And all this day he had whipped his
stronger comrades into venturing a thousand miles of the stiffest
hardship man can conceive. He was the incarnation of the unrest
of his race, and the old Teutonic stubbornness, dashed with the
quick grasp and action of the Yankee, held the flesh in the
bondage of the spirit.
'All those in favor of going on with the dogs as soon as the ice
sets, say ay.' 'Ay!' rang out eight voices--voices destined to
string a trail of oaths along many a hundred miles of pain.
'Contrary minded?' 'No!' For the first time the Incapables were
united without some compromise of personal interests.
'And what are you going to do about it?' Weatherbee added
belligerently.
'Majority rule! Majority rule!' clamored the rest of the party.
'I know the expedition is liable to fall through if you don't
come,' Sloper replied sweetly; 'but I guess, if we try real hard,
we can manage to do without you.
What do you say, boys?' The sentiment was cheered to the echo.
'But I say, you know,' Cuthfert ventured apprehensively; 'what's
a chap like me to do?'
'Ain't you coming with us.' 'No--o.' 'Then do as you damn well
please. We won't have nothing to say.' 'Kind o' calkilate yuh
might settle it with that canoodlin' pardner of yourn,' suggested
a heavy-going Westerner from the Dakotas, at the same time
pointing out Weatherbee. 'He'll be shore to ask yuh what yur
a-goin' to do when it comes to cookin' an' gatherin' the wood.'
'Then we'll consider it all arranged,' concluded Sloper.
'We'll pull out tomorrow, if we camp within five miles--just to
get everything in running order and remember if we've forgotten
anything.' The sleds groaned by on their steel-shod runners, and
the dogs strained low in the harnesses in which they were born to
die.
Jacques Baptiste paused by the side of Sloper to get a last
glimpse of the cabin. The smoke curled up pathetically from the
Yukon stovepipe. The two Incapables were watching them from the
doorway.
Sloper laid his hand on the other's shoulder.
'Jacques Baptiste, did you ever hear of the Kilkenny cats?' The
half-breed shook his head.
'Well, my friend and good comrade, the Kilkenny cats fought till
neither hide, nor hair, nor yowl, was left. You understand?--till
nothing was left. Very good.
Now, these two men don't like work. They'll be all alone in that
cabin all winter--a mighty long, dark winter. Kilkenny cats--well?'
The Frenchman in Baptiste shrugged his shoulders, but the Indian
in him was silent. Nevertheless, it was an eloquent shrug,
pregnant with prophecy. Things prospered in the little cabin at
first. The rough badinage of their comrades had made Weatherbee
and Cuthfert conscious of the mutual responsibility which had
devolved upon them; besides, there was not so much work after all
for two healthy men. And the removal of the cruel whiphand, or in
other words the bulldozing half-breed, had brought with it a
joyous reaction. At first, each strove to outdo the other, and
they performed petty tasks with an unction which would have
opened the eyes of their comrades who were now wearing out bodies
and souls on the Long Trail.
All care was banished. The forest, which shouldered in upon them
from three sides, was an inexhaustible woodyard. A few yards from
their door slept the Porcupine, and a hole through its winter
robe formed a bubbling spring of water, crystal clear and
painfully cold. But they soon grew to find fault with even that.
The hole would persist in freezing up, and thus gave them many a
miserable hour of ice-chopping. The unknown builders of the cabin
had extended the sidelogs so as to support a cache at the rear.
In this was stored the bulk of the party's provisions.
Food there was, without stint, for three times the men who were
fated to live upon it. But the most of it was the kind which
built up brawn and sinew, but did not tickle the palate.
True, there was sugar in plenty for two ordinary men; but these
two were little else than children. They early discovered the
virtues of hot water judiciously saturated with sugar, and they
prodigally swam their flapjacks and soaked their crusts in the
rich, white syrup.
Then coffee and tea, and especially the dried fruits, made
disastrous inroads upon it. The first words they had were over
the sugar question. And it is a really serious thing when two
men, wholly dependent upon each other for company, begin to
quarrel.
Weatherbee loved to discourse blatantly on politics, while
Cuthfert, who had been prone to clip his coupons and let the
commonwealth jog on as best it might, either ignored the subject
or delivered himself of startling epigrams. But the clerk was too
obtuse to appreciate the clever shaping of thought, and this
waste of ammunition irritated Cuthfert.
He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy, and it
worked him quite a hardship, this loss of an audience. He felt
personally aggrieved and unconsciously held his muttonhead
companion responsible for it.
Save existence, they had nothing in common--came in touch on no
single point.
Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but clerking all his
life; Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and had
written not a little. The one was a lower-class man who
considered himself a gentleman, and the other was a gentleman who
knew himself to be such. From this it may be remarked that a man
can be a gentleman without possessing the first instinct of true
comradeship. The clerk was as sensuous as the other was
aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length and
chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitive
master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas. He
deemed the clerk a filthy, uncultured brute, whose place was in
the muck with the swine, and told him so; and he was reciprocally
informed that he was a milk-and-water sissy and a cad. Weatherbee
could not have defined 'cad' for his life; but it satisfied its
purpose, which after all seems the main point in life.
Weatherbee flatted every third note and sang such songs as 'The
Boston Burglar' and 'the Handsome Cabin Boy,' for hours at a
time, while Cuthfert wept with rage, till he could stand it no
longer and fled into the outer cold. But there was no escape. The
intense frost could not be endured for long at a time, and the
little cabin crowded them--beds, stove, table, and all--into a
space of ten by twelve. The very presence of either became a
personal affront to the other, and they lapsed into sullen
silences which increased in length and strength as the days went
by. Occasionally, the flash of an eye or the curl of a lip got
the better of them, though they strove to wholly ignore each
other during these mute periods.
And a great wonder sprang up in the breast of each, as to how God
had ever come to create the other.
With little to do, time became an intolerable burden to them.
This naturally made them still lazier. They sank into a physical
lethargy which there was no escaping, and which made them rebel
at the performance of the smallest chore. One morning when it was
his turn to cook the common breakfast, Weatherbee rolled out of
his blankets, and to the snoring of his companion, lighted first
the slush lamp and then the fire. The kettles were frozen hard,
and there was no water in the cabin with which to wash. But he
did not mind that. Waiting for it to thaw, he sliced the bacon
and plunged into the hateful task of bread-making. Cuthfert had
been slyly watching through his half-closed lids.
Consequently there was a scene, in which they fervently blessed
each other, and agreed, henceforth, that each do his own cooking.
A week later, Cuthfert neglected his morning ablutions, but none
the less complacently ate the meal which he had cooked.
Weatherbee grinned. After that the foolish custom of washing
passed out of their lives.
As the sugar-pile and other little luxuries dwindled, they began
to be afraid they were not getting their proper shares, and in
order that they might not be robbed, they fell to gorging
themselves. The luxuries suffered in this gluttonous contest, as
did also the men.
In the absence of fresh vegetables and exercise, their blood
became impoverished, and a loathsome, purplish rash crept over
their bodies. Yet they refused to heed the warning.
Next, their muscles and joints began to swell, the flesh turning
black, while their mouths, gums, and lips took on the color of
rich cream. Instead of being drawn together by their misery, each
gloated over the other's symptoms as the scurvy took its course.
They lost all regard for personal appearance, and for that
matter, common decency. The cabin became a pigpen, and never once
were the beds made or fresh pine boughs laid underneath. Yet they
could not keep to their blankets, as they would have wished; for
the frost was inexorable, and the fire box consumed much fuel.
The hair of their heads and faces grew long and shaggy, while
their garments would have disgusted a ragpicker. But they did not
care. They were sick, and there was no one to see; besides, it
was very painful to move about.
To all this was added a new trouble--the Fear of the North. This
Fear was the joint child of the Great Cold and the Great Silence,
and was born in the darkness of December, when the sun dipped
below the horizon for good. It affected them according to their
natures.
Weatherbee fell prey to the grosser superstitions, and did his
best to resurrect the spirits which slept in the forgotten
graves. It was a fascinating thing, and in his dreams they came
to him from out of the cold, and snuggled into his blankets, and
told him of their toils and troubles ere they died. He shrank
away from the clammy contact as they drew closer and twined their
frozen limbs about him, and when they whispered in his ear of
things to come, the cabin rang with his frightened shrieks.
Cuthfert did not understand--for they no longer spoke--and when
thus awakened he invariably grabbed for his revolver. Then he
would sit up in bed, shivering nervously, with the weapon trained
on the unconscious dreamer. Cuthfert deemed the man going mad,
and so came to fear for his life.
His own malady assumed a less concrete form. The mysterious
artisan who had laid the cabin, log by log, had pegged a
wind-vane to the ridgepole. Cuthfert noticed it always pointed
south, and one day, irritated by its steadfastness of purpose, he
turned it toward the east. He watched eagerly, but never a breath
came by to disturb it. Then he turned the vane to the north,
swearing never again to touch it till the wind did blow. But the
air frightened him with its unearthly calm, and he often rose in
the middle of the night to see if the vane had veered--ten
degrees would have satisfied him. But no, it poised above him as
unchangeable as fate.
His imagination ran riot, till it became to him a fetish.
Sometimes he followed the path it pointed across the dismal
dominions, and allowed his soul to become saturated with the
Fear. He dwelt upon the unseen and the unknown till the burden of
eternity appeared to be crushing him. Everything in the Northland
had that crushing effect--the absence of life and motion; the
darkness; the infinite peace of the brooding land; the ghastly
silence, which made the echo of each heartbeat a sacrilege; the
solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful, inexpressible
something, which neither word nor thought could compass.
The world he had so recently left, with its busy nations and
great enterprises, seemed very far away. Recollections
occasionally obtruded--recollections of marts and galleries and
crowded thoroughfares, of evening dress and social functions, of
good men and dear women he had known--but they were dim memories
of a life he had lived long centuries agone, on some other
planet. This phantasm was the Reality. Standing beneath the
wind-vane, his eyes fixed on the polar skies, he could not bring
himself to realize that the Southland really existed, that at
that very moment it was a-roar with life and action.
There was no Southland, no men being born of women, no giving and
taking in marriage.
Beyond his bleak skyline there stretched vast solitudes, and
beyond these still vaster solitudes.
There were no lands of sunshine, heavy with the perfume of
flowers. Such things were only old dreams of paradise. The
sunlands of the West and the spicelands of the East, the smiling
Arcadias and blissful Islands of the Blest--ha! ha! His laughter
split the void and shocked him with its unwonted sound. There was
no sun.
This was the Universe, dead and cold and dark, and he its only
citizen. Weatherbee? At such moments Weatherbee did not count. He
was a Caliban, a monstrous phantom, fettered to him for untold
ages, the penalty of some forgotten crime.
He lived with Death among the dead, emasculated by the sense of
his own insignificance, crushed by the passive mastery of the
slumbering ages. The magnitude of all things appalled him.
Everything partook of the superlative save himself--the perfect
cessation of wind and motion, the immensity of the snow-covered
wildness, the height of the sky and the depth of the silence.
That wind-vane--if it would only move. If a thunderbolt would fall,
or the forest flare up in flame.
The rolling up of the heavens as a scroll, the crash of
Doom--anything, anything! But no, nothing moved; the Silence
crowded in, and the Fear of the North laid icy fingers on his
heart.
Once, like another Crusoe, by the edge of the river he came upon
a track--the faint tracery of a snowshoe rabbit on the delicate
snow-crust. It was a revelation.
There was life in the Northland. He would follow it, look upon
it, gloat over it.
He forgot his swollen muscles, plunging through the deep snow in
an ecstasy of anticipation. The forest swallowed him up, and the
brief midday twilight vanished; but he pursued his quest till
exhausted nature asserted itself and laid him helpless in the
snow.
There he groaned and cursed his folly, and knew the track to be
the fancy of his brain; and late that night he dragged himself
into the cabin on hands and knees, his cheeks frozen and a
strange numbness about his feet. Weatherbee grinned malevolently,
but made no offer to help him. He thrust needles into his toes
and thawed them out by the stove. A week later mortification set
in.
But the clerk had his own troubles. The dead men came out of
their graves more frequently now, and rarely left him, waking or
sleeping. He grew to wait and dread their coming, never passing
the twin cairns without a shudder. One night they came to him in
his sleep and led him forth to an appointed task. Frightened into
inarticulate horror, he awoke between the heaps of stones and
fled wildly to the cabin. But he had lain there for some time,
for his feet and cheeks were also frozen.
Sometimes he became frantic at their insistent presence, and
danced about the cabin, cutting the empty air with an axe, and
smashing everything within reach.
During these ghostly encounters, Cuthfert huddled into his
blankets and followed the madman about with a cocked revolver,
ready to shoot him if he came too near.
But, recovering from one of these spells, the clerk noticed the
weapon trained upon him.
His suspicions were aroused, and thenceforth he, too, lived in
fear of his life. They watched each other closely after that, and
faced about in startled fright whenever either passed behind the
other's back. The apprehensiveness became a mania which
controlled them even in their sleep. Through mutual fear they
tacitly let the slush-lamp burn all night, and saw to a plentiful
supply of bacon-grease before retiring. The slightest movement on
the part of one was sufficient to arouse the other, and many a
still watch their gazes countered as they shook beneath their
blankets with fingers on the trigger-guards.
What with the Fear of the North, the mental strain, and the
ravages of the disease, they lost all semblance of humanity,
taking on the appearance of wild beasts, hunted and desperate.
Their cheeks and noses, as an aftermath of the freezing, had
turned black.
Their frozen toes had begun to drop away at the first and second
joints. Every movement brought pain, but the fire box was
insatiable, wringing a ransom of torture from their miserable
bodies. Day in, day out, it demanded its food--a veritable pound
of flesh--and they dragged themselves into the forest to chop
wood on their knees. Once, crawling thus in search of dry sticks,
unknown to each other they entered a thicket from opposite sides.
Suddenly, without warning, two peering death's-heads confronted
each other. Suffering had so transformed them that recognition
was impossible. They sprang to their feet, shrieking with terror,
and dashed away on their mangled stumps; and falling at the
cabin's door, they clawed and scratched like demons till they
discovered their mistake.
Occasionally they lapsed normal, and during one of these sane
intervals, the chief bone of contention, the sugar, had been
divided equally between them. They guarded their separate sacks,
stored up in the cache, with jealous eyes; for there were but a
few cupfuls left, and they were totally devoid of faith in each
other.
But one day Cuthfert made a mistake. Hardly able to move, sick
with pain, with his head swimming and eyes blinded, he crept into
the cache, sugar canister in hand, and mistook Weatherbee's sack
for his own.
January had been born but a few days when this occurred. The sun
had some time since passed its lowest southern declination, and
at meridian now threw flaunting streaks of yellow light upon the
northern sky. On the day following his mistake with the sugar-bag,
Cuthfert found himself feeling better, both in body and in
spirit. As noontime drew near and the day brightened, he dragged
himself outside to feast on the evanescent glow, which was to him
an earnest of the sun's future intentions. Weatherbee was also
feeling somewhat better, and crawled out beside him. They propped
themselves in the snow beneath the moveless wind-vane, and waited.
The stillness of death was about them. In other climes, when
nature falls into such moods, there is a subdued air of
expectancy, a waiting for some small voice to take up the broken
strain. Not so in the North. The two men had lived seeming eons
in this ghostly peace.
They could remember no song of the past; they could conjure no
song of the future. This unearthly calm had always been--the
tranquil silence of eternity.
Their eyes were fixed upon the north. Unseen, behind their backs,
behind the towering mountains to the south, the sun swept toward
the zenith of another sky than theirs. Sole spectators of the
mighty canvas, they watched the false dawn slowly grow. A faint
flame began to glow and smoulder. It deepened in intensity,
ringing the changes of reddish-yellow, purple, and saffron. So
bright did it become that Cuthfert thought the sun must surely be
behind it--a miracle, the sun rising in the north! Suddenly,
without warning and without fading, the canvas was swept clean.
There was no color in the sky. The light had gone out of the day.
They caught their breaths in half-sobs. But lo! the air was
aglint with particles of scintillating frost, and there, to the
north, the wind-vane lay in vague outline of the snow.
A shadow! A shadow! It was exactly midday. They jerked their
heads hurriedly to the south. A golden rim peeped over the
mountain's snowy shoulder, smiled upon them an instant, then
dipped from sight again.
There were tears in their eyes as they sought each other. A
strange softening came over them. They felt irresistibly drawn
toward each other. The sun was coming back again. It would be
with them tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.
And it would stay longer every visit, and a time would come when
it would ride their heaven day and night, never once dropping
below the skyline. There would be no night.
The ice-locked winter would be broken; the winds would blow and
the forests answer; the land would bathe in the blessed sunshine,
and life renew.
Hand in hand, they would quit this horrid dream and journey back
to the Southland. They lurched blindly forward, and their hands
met--their poor maimed hands, swollen and distorted beneath their
mittens.
But the promise was destined to remain unfulfilled. The Northland
is the Northland, and men work out their souls by strange rules,
which other men, who have not journeyed into far countries,
cannot come to understand.
An hour later, Cuthfert put a pan of bread into the oven, and
fell to speculating on what the surgeons could do with his feet
when he got back. Home did not seem so very far away now.
Weatherbee was rummaging in the cache. Of a sudden, he raised a
whirlwind of blasphemy, which in turn ceased with startling
abruptness. The other man had robbed his sugar-sack. Still,
things might have happened differently, had not the two dead men
come out from under the stones and hushed the hot words in his
throat. They led him quite gently from the cache, which he forgot
to close. That consummation was reached; that something they had
whispered to him in his dreams was about to happen. They guided
him gently, very gently, to the woodpile, where they put the axe
in his hands.
Then they helped him shove open the cabin door, and he felt sure
they shut it after him--at least he heard it slam and the latch
fall sharply into place. And he knew they were waiting just
without, waiting for him to do his task.
'Carter! I say, Carter!' Percy Cuthfert was frightened at the
look on the clerk's face, and he made haste to put the table
between them.
Carter Weatherbee followed, without haste and without enthusiasm.
There was neither pity nor passion in his face, but rather the
patient, stolid look of one who has certain work to do and goes
about it methodically.
'I say, what's the matter?'
The clerk dodged back, cutting off his retreat to the door, but
never opening his mouth.
'I say, Carter, I say; let's talk. There's a good chap.' The
master of arts was thinking rapidly, now, shaping a skillful
flank movement on the bed where his Smith & Wesson lay. Keeping
his eyes on the madman, he rolled backward on the bunk, at the
same time clutching the pistol.
'Carter!' The powder flashed full in Weatherbee's face, but he
swung his weapon and leaped forward. The axe bit deeply at the
base of the spine, and Percy Cuthfert felt all consciousness of
his lower limbs leave him. Then the clerk fell heavily upon him,
clutching him by the throat with feeble fingers. The sharp bite
of the axe had caused Cuthfert to drop the pistol, and as his
lungs panted for release, he fumbled aimlessly for it among the
blankets. Then he remembered. He slid a hand up the clerk's belt
to the sheath-knife; and they drew very close to each other in
that last clinch.
Percy Cuthfert felt his strength leave him. The lower portion of
his body was useless, The inert weight of Weatherbee crushed
him--crushed him and pinned him there like a bear under a trap.
The cabin became filled with a familiar odor, and he knew the
bread to be burning. Yet what did it matter? He would never need
it. And there were all of six cupfuls of sugar in the cache--if
he had foreseen this he would not have been so saving the last
several days. Would the wind-vane ever move? Why not' Had he not
seen the sun today? He would go and see. No; it was impossible to
move. He had not thought the clerk so heavy a man.
How quickly the cabin cooled! The fire must be out. The cold was
forcing in.
It must be below zero already, and the ice creeping up the inside
of the door. He could not see it, but his past experience enabled
him to gauge its progress by the cabin's temperature. The lower
hinge must be white ere now. Would the tale of this ever reach
the world? How would his friends take it? They would read it over
their coffee, most likely, and talk it over at the clubs. He
could see them very clearly, 'Poor Old Cuthfert,' they murmured;
'not such a bad sort of a chap, after all.' He smiled at their
eulogies, and passed on in search of a Turkish bath. It was the
same old crowd upon the streets.
Strange, they did not notice his moosehide moccasins and tattered
German socks! He would take a cab. And after the bath a shave
would not be bad. No; he would eat first.
Steak, and potatoes, and green things how fresh it all was! And
what was that? Squares of honey, streaming liquid amber! But why
did they bring so much? Ha! ha! he could never eat it all.
Shine! Why certainly. He put his foot on the box. The bootblack
looked curiously up at him, and he remembered his moosehide
moccasins and went away hastily.
Hark! The wind-vane must be surely spinning. No; a mere singing
in his ears.
That was all--a mere singing. The ice must have passed the latch
by now. More likely the upper hinge was covered. Between the
moss-chinked roof-poles, little points of frost began to appear.
How slowly they grew! No; not so slowly. There was a new one, and
there another. Two--three--four; they were coming too fast to
count. There were two growing together. And there, a third had
joined them.
Why, there were no more spots. They had run together and formed a
sheet.
Well, he would have company. If Gabriel ever broke the silence of
the North, they would stand together, hand in hand, before the
great White Throne. And God would judge them, God would judge
them!
Then Percy Cuthfert closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.
