In a Far Country
When a man journeys into a far country, he mustbe prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and toacquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the newland; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, andoftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conducthas hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean facultyof adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a sourceof pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the rutsin which they were created, the pressure of the alteredenvironment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spiritunder the new restrictions which they do not understand. Thischafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils andleading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man whocannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his owncountry; if he delay too long, he will surely die.The man who turns his back upon the comforts of an eldercivilization, to face the savage youth, the primordial simplicityof the North, may estimate success at an inverse ratio to thequantity and quality of his hopelessly fixed habits. He willsoon discover, if he be a fit candidate, that the material habitsare the less important. The exchange of such things as a daintymenu 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 inlearning properly to shape his mind's attitude toward allthings, and especially toward his fellow man. For the courtesiesof ordinary life, he must substitute unselfishness, forbearance,and tolerance. Thus, and thus only, can he gain that pearl ofgreat price--true comradeship. He must not say 'thank you'; hemust mean it without opening his mouth, and prove it byresponding in kind. In short, he must substitute the deed for theword, the spirit for the letter.When the world rang with the tale of Arctic gold, and the lure ofthe North gripped the heartstrings of men, Carter Weatherbeethrew up his snug clerkship, turned the half of his savings overto his wife, and with the remainder bought an outfit. There wasno romance in his nature--the bondage of commerce had crushed allthat; he was simply tired of the ceaseless grind, and wished torisk great hazards in view of corresponding returns. Like manyanother fool, disdaining the old trails used by the Northlandpioneers for a score of years, he hurried to Edmonton in thespring 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 theKlondike. But the route it had mapped out to attain that goaltook away the breath of the hardiest native, born and bred to thevicissitudes of the Northwest. Even Jacques Baptiste, born of aChippewa woman and a renegade voyageur (having raised his firstwhimpers in a deerskin lodge north of the sixty-fifth parallel,and had the same hushed by blissful sucks of raw tallow), wassurprised. Though he sold his services to them and agreed totravel even to the never-opening ice, he shook his head ominouslywhenever his advice was asked.Percy Cuthfert's evil star must have been in the ascendant, forhe, too, joined this company of argonauts. He was an ordinaryman, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is sayinga good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture--noreason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormaldevelopment of sentimentality. He mistook this for the truespirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done thelike, and made as fatal a mistake.The first break-up of spring found the party following theice-run of Elk River. It was an imposing fleet, for the outfitwas large, and they were accompanied by a disreputable contingentof half-breed voyageurs with their women and children. Day in andday out, they labored with the bateaux and canoes, foughtmosquitoes and other kindred pests, or sweated and swore at theportages. Severe toil like this lays a man naked to the veryroots 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 andPercy Cuthfert. The whole party complained less of its aches andpains than did either of them. Not once did they volunteer forthe thousand and one petty duties of the camp. A bucket of waterto be brought, an extra armful of wood to be chopped, the dishesto be washed and wiped, a search to be made through the outfitfor some suddenly indispensable article--and these two effetescions of civilization discovered sprains or blisters requiringinstant attention.They were the first to turn in at night, with score of tasks yetundone; the last to turn out in the morning, when the startshould be in readiness before the breakfast was begun.They were the first to fall to at mealtime, the last to have ahand in the cooking; the first to dive for a slim delicacy, thelast to discover they had added to their own another man's share.If they toiled at the oars, they slyly cut the water at eachstroke and allowed the boat's momentum to float up the blade.They thought nobody noticed; but their comrades swore under theirbreaths and grew to hate them, while Jacques Baptiste sneeredopenly and damned them from morning till night. But JacquesBaptiste was no gentleman.At the Great Slave, Hudson Bay dogs were purchased, and the fleetsank to the guards with its added burden of dried fish andpemican. Then canoe and bateau answered to the swift current ofthe 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, overcomeby the common dread of the Unknown Lands, their voyageurs beganto desert, and Fort of Good Hope saw the last and bravest bendingto the towlines as they bucked the current down which they had sotreacherously glided.Jacques Baptiste alone remained. Had he not sworn to travel evento the never-opening ice? The lying charts, compiled in main fromhearsay, were now constantly consulted.And they felt the need of hurry, for the sun had already passedits northern solstice and was leading the winter south again.Skirting the shores of the bay, where the Mackenzie disemboguesinto the Arctic Ocean, they entered the mouth of the Little PeelRiver. Then began the arduous up-stream toil, and the twoIncapables fared worse than ever. Towline and pole, paddle andtumpline, rapids and portages--such tortures served to give theone a deep disgust for great hazards, and printed for the other afiery text on the true romance of adventure. One day they waxedmutinous, and being vilely cursed by Jacques Baptiste, turned, asworms sometimes will. But the half-breed thrashed the twain, andsent them, bruised and bleeding, about their work. It was thefirst time either had been manhandled.Abandoning their river craft at the headwaters of the LittlePeel, they consumed the rest of the summer in the great portageover the Mackenzie watershed to the West Rat. This little streamfed the Porcupine, which in turn joined the Yukon where thatmighty highway of the North countermarches on the Arctic Circle.But they had lost in the race with winter, and one day they tiedtheir rafts to the thick eddy-ice and hurried their goods ashore.That night the river jammed and broke several times; thefollowing morning it had fallen asleep for good. 'We can't bemore'n four hundred miles from the Yukon,' concluded Sloper,multiplying his thumb nails by the scale of the map. Thecouncil, in which the two Incapables had whined to excellentdisadvantage, was drawing to a close.'Hudson Bay Post, long time ago. No use um now.' JacquesBaptiste's father had made the trip for the Fur Company in theold days, incidentally marking the trail with a couple of frozentoes.Sufferin' cracky!' cried another of the party. 'No whites?' 'Narywhite,' Sloper sententiously affirmed; 'but it's only fivehundred more up the Yukon to Dawson. Call it a rough thousandfrom here.' Weatherbee and Cuthfert groaned in chorus.'How long'll that take, Baptiste?' The half-breed figured for amoment. 'Workum like hell, no man play out,tentwenty--forty--fifty days. Um babies come' (designating theIncapables), 'no can tell. Mebbe when hell freeze over; mebbe notthen.' The manufacture of snowshoes and moccasins ceased.Somebody called the name of an absent member, who came out of anancient cabin at the edge of the campfire and joined them. Thecabin was one of the many mysteries which lurk in the vastrecesses of the North. Built when and by whom, no man could tell.Two graves in the open, piled high with stones, perhaps containedthe secret of those early wanderers. But whose hand had piled thestones? The moment had come. Jacques Baptiste paused in thefitting of a harness and pinned the struggling dog in the snow.The cook made mute protest for delay, threw a handful of baconinto a noisy pot of beans, then came to attention. Sloper rose tohis feet. His body was a ludicrous contrast to the healthyphysiques of the Incapables. Yellow and weak, fleeing from aSouth American fever-hole, he had not broken his flight acrossthe zones, and was still able to toil with men. His weight wasprobably ninety pounds, with the heavy hunting knife thrown in,and his grizzled hair told of a prime which had ceased to be. Thefresh young muscles of either Weatherbee or Cuthfert were equalto ten times the endeavor of his; yet he could walk them into theearth in a day's journey. And all this day he had whipped hisstronger comrades into venturing a thousand miles of the stiffesthardship man can conceive. He was the incarnation of the unrestof his race, and the old Teutonic stubbornness, dashed with thequick grasp and action of the Yankee, held the flesh in thebondage of the spirit.'All those in favor of going on with the dogs as soon as the icesets, say ay.' 'Ay!' rang out eight voices--voices destined tostring a trail of oaths along many a hundred miles of pain.'Contrary minded?' 'No!' For the first time the Incapables wereunited without some compromise of personal interests.'And what are you going to do about it?' Weatherbee addedbelligerently.'Majority rule! Majority rule!' clamored the rest of the party.'I know the expedition is liable to fall through if you don'tcome,' 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'sa chap like me to do?''Ain't you coming with us.' 'No--o.' 'Then do as you damn wellplease. We won't have nothing to say.' 'Kind o' calkilate yuhmight settle it with that canoodlin' pardner of yourn,' suggesteda heavy-going Westerner from the Dakotas, at the same timepointing out Weatherbee. 'He'll be shore to ask yuh what yura-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 toget everything in running order and remember if we've forgottenanything.' The sleds groaned by on their steel- shod runners, andthe dogs strained low in the harnesses in which they were born todie.Jacques Baptiste paused by the side of Sloper to get a lastglimpse of the cabin. The smoke curled up pathetically from theYukon stovepipe. The two Incapables were watching them from thedoorway.Sloper laid his hand on the other's shoulder.'Jacques Baptiste, did you ever hear of the Kilkenny cats?' Thehalf-breed shook his head.'Well, my friend and good comrade, the Kilkenny cats fought tillneither hide, nor hair, nor yowl, was left. You understand?--tillnothing was left. Very good.Now, these two men don't like work. They'll be all alone in thatcabin all wintera mighty long, dark winter. Kilkenny cats--well?'The Frenchman in Baptiste shrugged his shoulders, but the Indianin him was silent. Nevertheless, it was an eloquent shrug,pregnant with prophecy. Things prospered in the little cabin atfirst. The rough badinage of their comrades had made Weatherbeeand Cuthfert conscious of the mutual responsibility which haddevolved upon them; besides, there was not so much work after allfor two healthy men. And the removal of the cruel whiphand, or inother words the bulldozing half-breed, had brought with it ajoyous reaction. At first, each strove to outdo the other, andthey performed petty tasks with an unction which would haveopened the eyes of their comrades who were now wearing out bodiesand souls on the Long Trail.All care was banished. The forest, which shouldered in upon themfrom three sides, was an inexhaustible woodyard. A few yards fromtheir door slept the Porcupine, and a hole through its winterrobe formed a bubbling spring of water, crystal clear andpainfully cold. But they soon grew to find fault with even that.The hole would persist in freezing up, and thus gave them many amiserable hour of ice-chopping. The unknown builders of the cabinhad 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 werefated to live upon it. But the most of it was the kind whichbuilt up brawn and sinew, but did not tickle the palate.True, there was sugar in plenty for two ordinary men; but thesetwo were little else than children. They early discovered thevirtues of hot water judiciously saturated with sugar, and theyprodigally swam their flapjacks and soaked their crusts in therich, white syrup.Then coffee and tea, and especially the dried fruits, madedisastrous inroads upon it. The first words they had were overthe sugar question. And it is a really serious thing when twomen, wholly dependent upon each other for company, begin toquarrel.Weatherbee loved to discourse blatantly on politics, whileCuthfert, who had been prone to clip his coupons and let thecommonwealth jog on as best it might, either ignored the subjector delivered himself of startling epigrams. But the clerk was tooobtuse to appreciate the clever shaping of thought, and thiswaste of ammunition irritated Cuthfert.He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy, and itworked him quite a hardship, this loss of an audience. He feltpersonally aggrieved and unconsciously held his muttonheadcompanion responsible for it.Save existence, they had nothing in common--came in touch on nosingle point.Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but clerking all hislife; Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and hadwritten not a little. The one was a lower-class man whoconsidered himself a gentleman, and the other was a gentleman whoknew himself to be such. From this it may be remarked that a mancan be a gentleman without possessing the first instinct of truecomradeship. The clerk was as sensuous as the other wasaesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length andchiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitivemaster of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas. Hedeemed the clerk a filthy, uncultured brute, whose place was inthe muck with the swine, and told him so; and he was reciprocallyinformed that he was a milk-andwater sissy and a cad. Weatherbeecould not have defined 'cad' for his life; but it satisfied itspurpose, which after all seems the main point in life.Weatherbee flatted every third note and sang such songs as 'TheBoston Burglar' and 'the Handsome Cabin Boy,' for hours at atime, while Cuthfert wept with rage, till he could stand it nolonger and fled into the outer cold. But there was no escape. Theintense frost could not be endured for long at a time, and thelittle cabin crowded them--beds, stove, table, and all--into aspace of ten by twelve. The very presence of either became apersonal affront to the other, and they lapsed into sullensilences which increased in length and strength as the days wentby. Occasionally, the flash of an eye or the curl of a lip gotthe better of them, though they strove to wholly ignore eachother during these mute periods.And a great wonder sprang up in the breast of each, as to how Godhad 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 physicallethargy which there was no escaping, and which made them rebelat the performance of the smallest chore. One morning when it washis turn to cook the common breakfast, Weatherbee rolled out ofhis blankets, and to the snoring of his companion, lighted firstthe slush lamp and then the fire. The kettles were frozen hard,and there was no water in the cabin with which to wash. But hedid not mind that. Waiting for it to thaw, he sliced the baconand plunged into the hateful task of bread-making. Cuthfert hadbeen slyly watching through his half-closed lids.Consequently there was a scene, in which they fervently blessedeach other, and agreed, henceforth, that each do his owncooking. 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 washingpassed out of their lives.As the sugar-pile and other little luxuries dwindled, they beganto be afraid they were not getting their proper shares, and inorder that they might not be robbed, they fell to gorgingthemselves. The luxuries suffered in this gluttonous contest, asdid also the men.In the absence of fresh vegetables and exercise, their bloodbecame impoverished, and a loathsome, purplish rash crept overtheir bodies. Yet they refused to heed the warning.Next, their muscles and joints began to swell, the flesh turningblack, while their mouths, gums, and lips took on the color ofrich cream. Instead of being drawn together by their misery, eachgloated over the other's symptoms as the scurvy took its course.They lost all regard for personal appearance, and for thatmatter, common decency. The cabin became a pigpen, and never oncewere the beds made or fresh pine boughs laid underneath. Yet theycould not keep to their blankets, as they would have wished; forthe frost was inexorable, and the fire box consumed much fuel.The hair of their heads and faces grew long and shaggy, whiletheir garments would have disgusted a ragpicker. But they did notcare. They were sick, and there was no one to see; besides, itwas very painful to move about.To all this was added a new trouble--the Fear of the North. ThisFear was the joint child of the Great Cold and the Great Silence,and was born in the darkness of December, when the sun dippedbelow the horizon for good. It affected them according to theirnatures.Weatherbee fell prey to the grosser superstitions, and did hisbest to resurrect the spirits which slept in the forgottengraves. It was a fascinating thing, and in his dreams they cameto him from out of the cold, and snuggled into his blankets, andtold him of their toils and troubles ere they died. He shrankaway from the clammy contact as they drew closer and twined theirfrozen limbs about him, and when they whispered in his ear ofthings to come, the cabin rang with his frightened shrieks.Cuthfert did not understand- for they no longer spoke--and whenthus awakened he invariably grabbed for his revolver. Then hewould sit up in bed, shivering nervously, with the weapon trainedon 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 mysteriousartisan who had laid the cabin, log by log, had pegged awind-vane to the ridgepole. Cuthfert noticed it always pointedsouth, and one day, irritated by its steadfastness of purpose, heturned it toward the east. He watched eagerly, but never a breathcame by to disturb it. Then he turned the vane to the north,swearing never again to touch it till the wind did blow. But theair frightened him with its unearthly calm, and he often rose inthe middle of the night to see if the vane had veered--tendegrees would have satisfied him. But no, it poised above him asunchangeable as fate.His imagination ran riot, till it became to him a fetish.Sometimes he followed the path it pointed across the dismaldominions, and allowed his soul to become saturated with theFear. He dwelt upon the unseen and the unknown till the burden ofeternity appeared to be crushing him. Everything in theNorthland had that crushing effect--the absence of life andmotion; the darkness; the infinite peace of the brooding land;the ghastly silence, which made the echo of each heartbeat asacrilege; the solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful,inexpressible something, which neither word nor thought couldcompass.The world he had so recently left, with its busy nations andgreat enterprises, seemed very far away. Recollectionsoccasionally obtruded--recollections of marts and galleries andcrowded thoroughfares, of evening dress and social functions, ofgood men and dear women he had known--but they were dim memoriesof a life he had lived long centuries agone, on some otherplanet. This phantasm was the Reality. Standing beneath thewind- vane, his eyes fixed on the polar skies, he could not bringhimself to realize that the Southland really existed, that atthat very moment it was a-roar with life and action.There was no Southland, no men being born of women, no giving andtaking in marriage.Beyond his bleak skyline there stretched vast solitudes, andbeyond these still vaster solitudes.There were no lands of sunshine, heavy with the perfume offlowers. Such things were only old dreams of paradise. Thesunlands of the West and the spicelands of the East, the smilingArcadias and blissful Islands of the Blest--ha! ha! His laughtersplit the void and shocked him with its unwonted sound. There wasno sun.This was the Universe, dead and cold and dark, and he its onlycitizen. Weatherbee? At such moments Weatherbee did not count. Hewas a Caliban, a monstrous phantom, fettered to him for untoldages, the penalty of some forgotten crime.He lived with Death among the dead, emasculated by the sense ofhis own insignificance, crushed by the passive mastery of theslumbering ages. The magnitude of all things appalled him.Everything partook of the superlative save himself--the perfectcessation of wind and motion, the immensity of the snow-coveredwildness, the height of the sky and the depth of the silence.That wind-vaneif 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 ofDoom--anything, anything! But no, nothing moved; the Silencecrowded in, and the Fear of the North laid icy fingers on hisheart.Once, like another Crusoe, by the edge of the river he came upona track--the faint tracery of a snowshoe rabbit on the delicatesnow-crust. It was a revelation.There was life in the Northland. He would follow it, look uponit, gloat over it.He forgot his swollen muscles, plunging through the deep snow inan ecstasy of anticipation. The forest swallowed him up, and thebrief midday twilight vanished; but he pursued his quest tillexhausted nature asserted itself and laid him helpless in thesnow.There he groaned and cursed his folly, and knew the track to bethe fancy of his brain; and late that night he dragged himselfinto the cabin on hands and knees, his cheeks frozen and astrange numbness about his feet. Weatherbee grinnedmalevolently, but made no offer to help him. He thrust needlesinto his toes and thawed them out by the stove. A week latermortification set in.But the clerk had his own troubles. The dead men came out oftheir graves more frequently now, and rarely left him, waking orsleeping. He grew to wait and dread their coming, never passingthe twin cairns without a shudder. One night they came to him inhis sleep and led him forth to an appointed task. Frightened intoinarticulate horror, he awoke between the heaps of stones andfled 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, anddanced about the cabin, cutting the empty air with an axe, andsmashing everything within reach.During these ghostly encounters, Cuthfert huddled into hisblankets 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 theweapon trained upon him.His suspicions were aroused, and thenceforth he, too, lived infear of his life. They watched each other closely after that, andfaced about in startled fright whenever either passed behind theother's back. The apprehensiveness became a mania whichcontrolled them even in their sleep. Through mutual fear theytacitly let the slush-lamp burn all night, and saw to a plentifulsupply of bacon-grease before retiring. The slightest movement onthe part of one was sufficient to arouse the other, and many astill watch their gazes countered as they shook beneath theirblankets with fingers on the trigger- guards.What with the Fear of the North, the mental strain, and theravages 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, hadturned black.Their frozen toes had begun to drop away at the first and secondjoints. Every movement brought pain, but the fire box wasinsatiable, wringing a ransom of torture from their miserablebodies. Day in, day out, it demanded its food--a veritable poundof flesh--and they dragged themselves into the forest to chopwood 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 confrontedeach other. Suffering had so transformed them that recognitionwas impossible. They sprang to their feet, shrieking with terror,and dashed away on their mangled stumps; and falling at thecabin's door, they clawed and scratched like demons till theydiscovered their mistake.Occasionally they lapsed normal, and during one of these saneintervals, the chief bone of contention, the sugar, had beendivided equally between them. They guarded their separate sacks,stored up in the cache, with jealous eyes; for there were but afew cupfuls left, and they were totally devoid of faith in eachother.But one day Cuthfert made a mistake. Hardly able to move, sickwith pain, with his head swimming and eyes blinded, he crept intothe cache, sugar canister in hand, and mistook Weatherbee's sackfor his own.January had been born but a few days when this occurred. The sunhad some time since passed its lowest southern declination, andat meridian now threw flaunting streaks of yellow light upon thenorthern sky. On the day following his mistake with the sugarbag,Cuthfert found himself feeling better, both in body and inspirit. As noontime drew near and the day brightened, he draggedhimself outside to feast on the evanescent glow, which was to himan earnest of the sun's future intentions. Weatherbee was alsofeeling somewhat better, and crawled out beside him. They proppedthemselves in the snow beneath the moveless windvane, and waited.The stillness of death was about them. In other climes, whennature falls into such moods, there is a subdued air ofexpectancy, a waiting for some small voice to take up the brokenstrain. Not so in the North. The two men had lived seeming eonsin this ghostly peace.They could remember no song of the past; they could conjure nosong of the future. This unearthly calm had always been--thetranquil silence of eternity.Their eyes were fixed upon the north. Unseen, behind their backs,behind the towering mountains to the south, the sun swept towardthe zenith of another sky than theirs. Sole spectators of themighty canvas, they watched the false dawn slowly grow. A faintflame began to glow and smoulder. It deepened in intensity,ringing the changes of reddish- yellow, purple, and saffron. Sobright did it become that Cuthfert thought the sun must surely bebehind 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 wasaglint with particles of scintillating frost, and there, to thenorth, the wind-vane lay in vague outline of the snow.A shadow! A shadow! It was exactly midday. They jerked theirheads hurriedly to the south. A golden rim peeped over themountain's snowy shoulder, smiled upon them an instant, thendipped from sight again.There were tears in their eyes as they sought each other. Astrange softening came over them. They felt irresistibly drawntoward each other. The sun was coming back again. It would bewith them tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.And it would stay longer every visit, and a time would come whenit would ride their heaven day and night, never once droppingbelow the skyline. There would be no night.The ice-locked winter would be broken; the winds would blow andthe forests answer; the land would bathe in the blessed sunshine,and life renew.Hand in hand, they would quit this horrid dream and journey backto the Southland. They lurched blindly forward, and their handsmet--their poor maimed hands, swollen and distorted beneath theirmittens.But the promise was destined to remain unfulfilled. TheNorthland is the Northland, and men work out their souls bystrange rules, which other men, who have not journeyed into farcountries, cannot come to understand.An hour later, Cuthfert put a pan of bread into the oven, andfell to speculating on what the surgeons could do with his feetwhen he got back. Home did not seem so very far away now.Weatherbee was rummaging in the cache. Of a sudden, he raised awhirlwind of blasphemy, which in turn ceased with startlingabruptness. The other man had robbed his sugar-sack. Still,things might have happened differently, had not the two dead mencome out from under the stones and hushed the hot words in histhroat. They led him quite gently from the cache, which he forgotto close. That consummation was reached; that something they hadwhispered to him in his dreams was about to happen. They guidedhim gently, very gently, to the woodpile, where they put the axein his hands.Then they helped him shove open the cabin door, and he felt surethey shut it after him- at least he heard it slam and the latchfall sharply into place. And he knew they were waiting justwithout, waiting for him to do his task.'Carter! I say, Carter!' Percy Cuthfert was frightened at thelook on the clerk's face, and he made haste to put the tablebetween them.Carter Weatherbee followed, without haste and without enthusiasm.There was neither pity nor passion in his face, but rather thepatient, stolid look of one who has certain work to do and goesabout it methodically.'I say, what's the matter?'The clerk dodged back, cutting off his retreat to the door, butnever opening his mouth.'I say, Carter, I say; let's talk. There's a good chap.' Themaster of arts was thinking rapidly, now, shaping a skillfulflank movement on the bed where his Smith & Wesson lay. Keepinghis eyes on the madman, he rolled backward on the bunk, at thesame time clutching the pistol.'Carter!' The powder flashed full in Weatherbee's face, but heswung his weapon and leaped forward. The axe bit deeply at thebase of the spine, and Percy Cuthfert felt all consciousness ofhis lower limbs leave him. Then the clerk fell heavily upon him,clutching him by the throat with feeble fingers. The sharp biteof the axe had caused Cuthfert to drop the pistol, and as hislungs panted for release, he fumbled aimlessly for it among theblankets. Then he remembered. He slid a hand up the clerk's beltto the sheath-knife; and they drew very close to each other inthat last clinch.Percy Cuthfert felt his strength leave him. The lower portion ofhis body was useless, The inert weight of Weatherbee crushedhim--crushed him and pinned him there like a bear under a trap.The cabin became filled with a familiar odor, and he knew thebread to be burning. Yet what did it matter? He would never needit. And there were all of six cupfuls of sugar in the cache--ifhe had foreseen this he would not have been so saving the lastseveral days. Would the wind-vane ever move? Why not' Had he notseen the sun today? He would go and see. No; it was impossible tomove. He had not thought the clerk so heavy a man.How quickly the cabin cooled! The fire must be out. The cold wasforcing in.It must be below zero already, and the ice creeping up the insideof the door. He could not see it, but his past experience enabledhim to gauge its progress by the cabin's temperature. The lowerhinge must be white ere now. Would the tale of this ever reachthe world? How would his friends take it? They would read it overtheir coffee, most likely, and talk it over at the clubs. Hecould see them very clearly, 'Poor Old Cuthfert,'they murmured; 'not such a bad sort of a chap, after all.' Hesmiled at their eulogies, and passed on in search of a Turkishbath. It was the same old crowd upon the streets.Strange, they did not notice his moosehide moccasins and tatteredGerman socks! He would take a cab. And after the bath a shavewould not be bad. No; he would eat first.Steak, and potatoes, and green things how fresh it all was! Andwhat was that? Squares of honey, streaming liquid amber! But whydid they bring so much? Ha! ha! he could never eat it all.Shine! Why certainly. He put his foot on the box. The bootblacklooked curiously up at him, and he remembered his moosehidemoccasins and went away hastily.Hark! The wind-vane must be surely spinning. No; a mere singingin his ears.That was all--a mere singing. The ice must have passed the latchby now. More likely the upper hinge was covered. Between themoss-chinked roof-poles, little points of frost began to appear.How slowly they grew! No; not so slowly. There was a new one, andthere another. Two--three--four; they were coming too fast tocount. There were two growing together. And there, a third hadjoined them.Why, there were no more spots. They had run together and formed asheet.Well, he would have company. If Gabriel ever broke the silence ofthe North, they would stand together, hand in hand, before thegreat White Throne. And God would judge them, God would judgethem!Then Percy Cuthfert closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.
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