Joyce was at his tenth story, the pipes were drawing well, and the birch logs singing softly, while Father John gazed at his entertainers with fascinated eyes.

“. . . . And so he fell into the car, and the grain poured in on him, and there he was, buried. That car wasn’t unloaded until spring, and then out he came like a board, and they buried him again, and no one knew he was heir to a million.”

Father John made a stunned, murmuring noise, and his hosts looked upon him fondly. Only Morris was discontented.

“I thought he’d have come out alive.”

“Alive?”

“Yes. Fed on the grain . . . .”

Royce turned his back on Morris, and Falconer began, hastily.

“But that’s not so queer as the man at Fort Duchesne. He was a scientific fellow, and he went mad, and ran after the shooting stars with a butterfly net. It was in the Fall, when the sky is generally fizzling with meteors. This fellow would run after them till he fell, exhausted, and they had to tell off a Siwash to retrieve him, which must have been very annoying. He’s in a private asylum in ’Frisco now, keeping copper-filings in a cage; thinks they’re larvæ and feeds them on lettuce leaves.”

“Poor soul, poor soul,” murmured Father John, helplessly, and for a few minutes there was silence.

“But that’s nothing to what happened to Ignatius O’Higgins up north.” Connor’s voice rolled as richly into the flat silence as a plum pudding on a table. “Out snaring rabbuts, he was, and put his foot in a bear trap. A while after, another trapper came by, and he wondering why the snow was all trod up with rabbut tracks, and they marching in squads like Ulstermen, bad luck to ’em. And then he went on a bit, and he knew; and the knowledge he had of the black, bitter heart of a rabbut gave him a turn, and he was a better Christian all his days, Father. All the buck-rabbuts east of the Rockies, fighting and kicking and straggling round that bear trap . . . .”

“Have another drink, Con,” said someone loudly, passing up the decanter. Connor helped himself, and drank, beaming, to the guest of the evening. “Here’s good luck and a fat living to you, Father Jack, and may you never want a bottle of the best to share with a friend.”

“A memorable night,” said Father John, looking very young and pink in the depths of his leather chair. “That’s what it’s been—a memorable night. It was very kind of you to ask me again, to take me in once more among you, to give me a share in this way of all the things you’ve seen and done and heard in all these years. And such things . . . . It’s a terrible world,” and he shuddered, slightly.

“Bless your heart,” said Royce, “but lots of queer things must have come your way since you took to—this,” and he leaned forward, and gently touched the shabby, black sleeve.

Father John looked at his cassock with some discontent. “Old women’s quarrels, and young folks’ love affairs, a mother to be comforted, or an old man ushered into Paradise. It’s God’s work,” finished Father John, wistfully, “but there’s no good denying it’s a bit dull.”

“The confessional?” suggested Royce, delicately.

Father John leaned forward, with a twinkle. “Shall I tell you? Well, it’s my belief all the bad, wild deeds are done by the Protestants, I hear so few of them.”

“But life and death—you must come closer to these than any of us. They’re not dull.”

“In the aggregate I find them so.”

“But surely, sometimes . . . .?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Father John brightened up a little. “There is something under my notice now. Not through the confessional, of course; it’s open, quite open. And it’s—well, curious. Yes,” he went on, judicially, “I should certainly call it curious.”

“Is it war, passion or revenge?” asked Royce, with a smile.

“Well,”—Father John did not smile,—“it is probably murder.”

“Probably murder? Don’t you know, then?”

“No. That’s the curious part of it. I don’t know, and the man who most likely did it, he doesn’t know.”

“O, come now, Father Jack . . . .”

“It’s a fact. He’d tell me if he knew, but he doesn’t.”

“Do you mean to tell us that a fellow could murder, not kill, murder—another fellow, and not know it?”

“Yes, I do,” said Father John, mildly, “that is just M’Cabe’s case.”

“Go on with his case,” said Connor, admiringly.

“Well, I only know it in bits, you understand—in flashes as he tells it to me—a flash of light so clear and vivid it’s painful, and then fog and darkness. I’m afraid it’s a pretty bad case, though I’ve grown fond of M’Cabe. It’s curious, too,” mused Father John, “how fond you do get of anyone or anything that looks to you for help. I ought to detest M’Cabe, he’s always sending one of his brats to call me up at night—thinking he’s going to remember . . . .”

“What was M’Cabe in his off hours?” asked Morris, with envy.

“M’Cabe? O, I’m afraid he was a seal-poacher. He tells me of fights with Japanese ships in the fog—bloody decks, and half-seen yellow faces. It’s all in a fog as he tells it—the ships and the men, the seals in the sea and the bull-walrus bellowing from the floes. I wish he could make it clearer to me, but he’s always down on the floor, groaning—afraid he’s going to remember.

“He must have seen some queer things, if you like, where Asia and America are still in the making, and no man can read the tides, and on the islands in the summer you walk waist-deep in flowers. M’Cabe says he’s gone ashore on one of these islands and picked harebells and fern till his arms could hold no more. And the next year the island’s gone, swallowed in the sea, and a new volcano spouting east-by-north in the offing. They’re very troublesome, those islands. And the natives are as strange as their own coasts; you see them, M’Cabe says, in their high-prowed boats, driving down the steel-grey channels, past the long promontories, out of the fog and into the fog again. They used to massacre the fur traders, and no one seems to know what they do now. They just go past, flying low, like birds, and the crews throw things at them . . . .

“Well, from what M’Cabe says, it wasn’t natives, but islands, that gave him his trouble. They seem to have been sailing very slowly up some coast in a fog, which lay thick on the sea like a layer of wool, but cleared so suddenly that the topsails were in golden day. On deck they could see nothing. They had a man at the top of the foremast, I think he said, and that man was absolutely cut off from them by the fog. They heard his voice as a voice from another world.

“They were just creeping along, only the topsails drawing. M’Cabe and another man were up in the bows, looking over the side. He says the sea came sliding out of the fog and curling alongside, pretty little gentle waves, as white as lambs. M’Cabe watched them for some time, he says, and then was going aft, when he heard the other man say, ‘Come back and look at this.’ He went and looked, and there were all the waves breaking black.

“Quite black, he says, like soot instead of foam. And then, as they stared, the fog grew pit-black ahead of them, as if a great mouth had opened. And it was all perfectly sudden and perfectly silent. They could see nothing, they could hear nothing, except that once the look-out man screamed. Then they looked up, out of their pit of fog . . .

“It was like a signal breaking out, M’Cabe says. I do not quite know what he means, but over the golden sky something deadly—smoke, ash, gas—was rushing and spreading. I can’t make out from him whether it looked red or black; but it was dark, and hot.

“Then they felt the sea tremble, and that blind ship fouled in fog was struck. Not tossed or struck by a wave, but by something that hit at her out of the fog. They’d all run aft like sheep, away from the blackness. And the next thing that M’Cabe knows is that he was in a small boat which had been trailing astern, alone with another man, drifting in the fog. The ship was gone as if that blow had smacked her out of existence—gone for ever. It is very curious how Time seemed to go wrong. The destruction or disappearance of the ship, in M’Cabe’s mind, happened instantaneously; as a matter of fact, it must have taken some moments, for the other man had had time to run and fetch a fur coat of which he was very proud. I know nothing of this man, except that he was, and that he had a fur coat; he was the first thing M’Cabe noticed with a clear mind, brushing his coat with black hands. They were as black as sweep’s, the boat was black, a black sea lopped after them oilily, and the fog rained black on them. ‘Is it snowing black?’ asked M’Cabe. And the other man, never looking up from the coat, grunted, ‘Nah, it’s ashes. There’s been an island blowed up, or something, and it’ll ruin my coat.’

“M’Cabe says he took a dislike to him and his coat, though he’d liked him well enough before; he was that unfriendly over it. Those are M’Cabe’s words—‘that unfriendly.’

“M’Cabe took the oars that were in the boat and paddled about in the fog to see if he could find the ship. He seems to have been a good deal shaken. He says he doesn’t remember anything else until the boat grated softly on a gravel beach and a great rush and screaming went past his head in the fog, and things black as bats which he took at first for devils, but they were only sooty gulls.

“They pulled the boat up and sat down on the beach waiting for the fog to lift, but it didn’t. It didn’t lift for days; the blackness went out of it and it grew lighter, but as thick, M’Cabe says, as milk. And all the time they had to stay on this little bit of an island, a few flat rocks and a little gravel huddled together in the sea. It was spring, the rocks were all glassy with ice every morning; but the gulls were laying about the beach tamer than poultry, and they gathered the rank eggs and ate them, and drank of the half-frozen sleet pools. Fire? They had nothing to burn but the seats of the boat; they tried to kindle these with their few matches, but the sea-soaked wood refused to catch, however fine they shaved it. They turned the boat over and dug little burrows in the sand to sleep in, lining them with dried weed. But it must have been cold beyond bearing. M’Cabe says he used to crawl out of his burrow in the morning, almost crying with cold. And the other man snoozing comfortably in the fur coat. I asked him why they didn’t sleep in one burrow and share the coat; he said he didn’t like to, the other man being ‘that unfriendly.’

“M’Cabe doesn’t know how long they were on the island. He says it was all fog, and sea-beasts bellowing, and great birds buffeting them, and cold; there was the other man, too, very careful not to tear his fur coat on the rocks. At last, M’Cabe says, what with the fog and the cold and the birds, he became so that he could not take his mind off that fur coat.

“He’d lie shaking in his burrow at night, thinking how warm he’d be with it on. He’d limp about the island by day, thinking what it would feel like if he could put his hands in the pockets. He’d cry, that great bull-headed raw-boned scamp, because the other man wouldn’t lend it to him. He would have blanks, gaps of thought or consciousness, when he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. And he’d come out of them to find himself following the other man about and staring at the coat.

“I think the other man was frightened. M’Cabe has shown him to me—just a glimpse—stout, bearded, with pale eyes, running round and round the island. M’Cabe thinks he must have chased him; he’d come out of his blank fits to fear the man would fall in and get the coat wet. ‘And how to dry it then,’ said M’Cabe, ‘I didn’t see.’ The other man never left off the coat; he clung to those mangy old fox-skins literally as you’d cling to life. You see him always, furred to his pale eyes, running clumsily among a white flutter of birds, and M’Cabe pursuing him, a man in a dream—a dream of warmth. . . . .

“He came out of this dream one day to find himself knee-deep in surf, the day blown clear as grey glass, and a whaler’s boat putting in to the island. He splashed to meet it, and a man hauled him aboard by the collar. M’Cabe’s very confused about this. He says they were very kind to him and fed him with rum with biscuit crumbs in it. They said, ‘Are there any more on ye?’ And he said ‘Yes;’ so they hunted every creek on the island, and thought he was dreaming till they found the two burrows under the boat. It wasn’t any use looking any longer; there was the island, bare as a child’s slate lung on the sea, and nothing near it but the gulls. So they tied the boat on astern and went. ‘This pore feller’s the only one saved,’ says someone, and someone else says, ‘Yes, and he wouldn’t have lasted long without he was kept warm. He’s pretty far gone as it is.’ With that, M’Cabe says, in a wild way, ‘It’s the other man who’s saved, and pore Bill M’Cabe, he’s a-lying froze on the island,’ and falls forward in a faint. Because, you see, looking down at himself, he’d seen he was all wrapped up in that old fox-fur coat.

“For some days after he’d come to aboard the whaler, he doesn’t seem to have done much or thought of much; he just lay in his bunk and shivered. They were very good to him; gave him blankets and the best food they had, and let him lie, for his mind was all in a fog. They spread the fur coat atop of the blankets, and whenever he’d lift his head or stretch his hand, there it would be. It didn’t worry him much at first, but as his strength came back, the fog in his brain lifted, all but a few patches. And he’d lie fingering the greasy fur, and wonder—and wonder—how it came there . . . .

“I’ve known men, bolder or weaker than M’Cabe, who’d have let those patches rest. But he couldn’t. He kept trying to blow the fog clear. He’d lie there, shaking under the fur coat, and fighting for memory till he was as weak as a rag, and the cook, who was especially good to him, would bring him a tin of bitter brown coffee and a hot stove-lid for his feet. . . . Those blank patches in his mind were like lead, like iron; he might wreck himself against them like a prisoner against a stone wall; his own brain, his own memory, would yield him nothing.

“How did he get the fur coat? What he struggled for was the complete picture; and in the centre, it was smeared with a great black brush. He could not remember.

“He saw himself and the other man in the boat, landing on the island, digging their burrows in the icy sand; saw again all the monotony of that suffering; saw them gathering eggs, whirling arms like windmills in the fog as they fought the great gulls. He could taste again the salty frost on his lips. He could see the other man running round the icy rocks, and a shadow of himself following anxiously. He could see the rime on the fur coat, the pockets bulging with eggs, a button that was loose and worried him for fear it would be lost. And he could see himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat. But between these two—blackness.

“How did he get it? What did he do?

“Did the other man die? They didn’t find him. Did he take off the coat, leave it behind him, and fall from the rocks while scrambling for eggs? Did M’Cabe push him off? Did he kill him first and then take off the coat and throw the body into the sea? ‘He didn’t feel his end near and will the coat to me,’ says M’Cabe, ‘he’d have wished to be buried with it on, he was that jealous of it.’ Many and many a time I’ve sat there with him and gone over every inch of that dirty old coat, hunting for a cut, a tear, a stain that might help him to remember, and he in a sweat of fear. ‘Father, it’ll come in another minute,’ he’d say, ‘in a minute I’ll know.’ But he never knew, he doesn’t know. The fog never lifted. The man in the fur coat running round the rocks in the mist—himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat: whatever lay between of accident, of murder, of death—whatever lay between, is locked in the mysterious archives of the brain, like a book, the covers of which he may never be permitted to open. He goes about his world, as it were, looking at his hands; and he does not know if they are clean, or if there is on them—blood.”

Father John sat silent, staring at the fire, and his hosts were silent also; until at last Royce rose leisurely, opened a drawer, and took therefrom a bundle of cheroots. “I think you are all agreed,” he said, “as to whom these belong?”

A chorus of assent and admiration rose on the words, and Royce leaned over and clapped Father John on the shoulder. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Padre,” he said.

“But your mechanism was a little too apparent,” said Morris jealously, “and I know where you got your setting from. It’s in here—” He turned and groped in the bookcase.

“When I went fishing with you a few score years ago,” put in Connor, “we’d limit the righteous increase to fifty per cent. I’d like to know how much ye tacked on to that fur coat. How many perch do ye reckon to a salmon now? Far as we go, boys,” he said, looking sadly at the cheroots, “ye can trust Holy Church to go one further. And I thought Jack that innocent, I tried me rabbuts on him.”

Royce grinned into Father John’s entirely bewildered face. “I don’t want to know the percentage. I’ve enjoyed a good yarn so well told that it took me in at first until you made it a little bit too effective. A bundle of these,” he went on, flourishing the cheroots, “always goes to the most successful liar of the evening. And I don’t think,” he finished gracefully, “that we’ve any of us a doubt as to who that is to-night . . .”

A noise at the door made him turn—made Father John pause with his mouth open and his hand outstretched in denial or acceptance. They heard the servant’s voice raised indignantly, and a short scuffle in the hall. Then the door opened and a girl ran into the room; a rough girl from the river front, with a shawl over her shoulders and the rain lying like a net of pearls on her solid flaxen hair. She ran to the priest like a dog, and caught his cassock with her square tanned hands, and began to wail, strangely, softly.

“Father, Father,” she besought him, “come to M’Cabe. O, come quick to poor M’Cabe. He’s remembered. . . . .”

“I’ll be back the third day at latest with the doctor. I’ve left you wood enough for three days and more and you’ve grub for a month.” Garth looked at her anxiously; his strong mouth twitched. Suddenly he leaned forward and brushed her cheek lightly with his yellow beard. “I—hate to leave you, little girl,” he said, with a gentleness not common with him, “but I guess it’s Derek’s only chance.”

“Of course you must go. It’s Derek’s only chance.” Dorette faced him steadily. She was pale, slight, sleepy-eyed, but wilderness born and bred, for all that; one guessed a spirit of steel in that fragile sheath. She finished wistfully: “There’ll be nothing for me to do—nothing, but—wait.”

“Only look after yourself and keep the stove up.”

“I’ll do it. And you—if you meet Maxime . . . .”

Rage blazed suddenly in her brother’s eyes. The barrel of his rifle gleamed blue as he gripped it. “If I meet Maxime,” he said, through his teeth, “it’s a finish for him or for me!”

He turned about without another word, and swung down the forest trail on his long run to Mandore.

Dorette watched him until he was no more than a dark shadow among the heavy blue shades that hung from spruce to spruce like tangible banners. All life, all sound, all motion seemed to go with him. Mile after mile, she knew, on each side of her was nothing but the same silence, the same stillness, league after league of the desolate fir forest of the North. She went into the cabin and bolted and barred the door behind her, as if the solitude were an enemy which she must keep out.

The cabin was a pleasant place. The walls were sheathed in red cedar, and there were fur rugs on the floor, red curtains at the windows. In the centre of the larger of the two rooms into which the cabin was divided stood the great iron stove, in winter the source of their very life.

Its voice filled the cabin with a roar like the forever unsatisfied roaring of the wind and sea—a hungry voice. Dorette swung open the heavy door, wincing from the furnace-glory within, as she flung on more wood. That was her one occupation until Garth came back—feeding the stove.

She went to one of the bunks—like the bunks of a ship—that were built on the wall behind the stove, and looked in.

Derek, her younger brother, lay there without sense or motion, as he had lain ever since the sergeant of police and Garth had carried him in and laid him there. He drowsed between life and death, shot through the body. Now and then he swallowed a little broth, but with no knowledge of the hand that fed him. She dared not touch him. There was nothing she could do for him but keep the cabin warm enough to sustain that flickering lamp of life till the doctor came, for the cold of that country kills like a sword.

Suddenly, clinging to the side of the bunk, she trembled. “If only you could speak to me, Derek,” she whispered. “If only I could hear your voice!”

But the only voice was the voice of the great stove.

Her mind painted for her the scene she had not witnessed—the hard men of the mines and the lumber camps, still men with formidable eyes, following Cain’s trail from Fort Dismay to Anisette; the end of the trail at a little lonely shack blinded in snow, ringed with watchful men; Derek pleading that Maxime might have “one more chance, boys;” the parley at the door, the shot coming from nowhere; men storming into the shack over Derek’s fallen body, and finding it empty; Maxime Dufour escaped again! She saw it all. Heard again Garth’s voice in hard-breathed sentences between shut teeth: “But he’s not goin’ to get away again. He’ll have to get food and shelter somewhere; and if it’s a thousand miles away, we’ll follow and shoot him down like the wolf he is!”

She glanced round, pale and shaken, thinking that still she heard that deep voice of bitter rage. But it was only the undertone of the roaring stove humming its angry song.

She busied herself about such duties as she could find. Twice she fed the stove from the pile of wood on the floor beside it. The fierce heat licked out at her each time, just as a savage beast will strike through the bars of his cage, and each time she shut the door with the sense of prisoning some lion-voiced living thing.

Her work was soon done. Everything in the cabin was tidied and tidied again. She glanced at the clock. Only an hour of the slow time had gone. Garth had only been gone an hour. She turned the clock with its face to the wall, took out a shirt she was making for Garth—red-and-black checked flannel, thick as felt—and stitched resolutely.

Her hearing, accustomed to the sound of the stove, as the ear adjusts itself to the thunder of a waterfall, was acute to catch the faintest noises. She heard the tiny sound of the thread passing through the flannel, the soft thud of snow slipping from the boughs of the forest, the least check and stumble in Derek’s shallow breathing. Each time she heard this last, her own heart checked and stumbled in tune with it. She held her own breath till her brother’s renewed its weak rhythm.

So the morning passed. In the afternoon, she found a snowshoe that needed re-stringing. Deftly as Montagnais she twisted the gut and wove the net.

It was dark sooner than she could have hoped. She needed no lamp. The stove filled the cabin with its glow. In the dark it became a beautiful and formidable thing, a shape of dull red, with a heart of lambent rose. She glanced at the little windows, sheathed thick with frost-ferns. It would be a cold night. Her thoughts went to Garth, then, with dread, to Maxime Dufour. She dragged her cot from the inner room, set it across the front of the stove, and lay down. The warmth was like a hand pressing on her eyelids.

With the subconscious watchfulness of those who care for the beloved, she was awake five times in the long night to feed the stove. Each time she looked at Derek, and thought, with a pang, that he was deeper sunken among the pillows. His eyes were not quite closed; the silvery line of eyeball reflected the red glow. She would have liked to close them, but her hand shrank from so prophetic an action.

The last time she woke the sun had risen. The gathered crystals on the windows were lit with a glow that paled the stove. Dorette went into the inner room and braided her hair.

That day passed as the first had done. Her brother was weaker. She pleaded with him, passionately tender. “Just a mouthful of soup, Derry. Wake up, Derry dear. Take it for my sake, Derry!” but her voice, which had dimly roused him the day before, could not reach him now. She looked round for something she might do for him.

The diminished heap of logs on the floor showed her work enough. She must bring in a fresh supply from the pile behind the cabin. She ate a hasty breakfast and made herself some coffee. Then, hooded and wrapped against the cold, she opened the door.

She stepped into a world of white, blue, and black; solid, translucent, and motionless as though built from gems. Where the blue sky touched the black trees there seemed to run a setting of gold; where the black trees trailed branches to the snow, was a stain of sapphire shadow. It was fiercely cold. She shut the door behind her, hastily, ran to the snow-buried wood pile behind the cabin, burdened herself with an armful of small logs, returned, set her load on the threshold, opened the door, and tumbled the wood on the floor. All the morning she worked thus. Her spirits rose; she began to believe that Derek would not die, and soon she might think of Garth’s return. The noise of the logs as she flung them on the floor pleased her. It was a change from the one unceasing voice that filled the cabin day and night—the voice of the stove.

The second night she was restless. She dared not sleep at first, for fear she should sleep too well. Wind came up with the electric stars; the great stove sang to a higher, more tremendous note; she could scarcely keep pace with its consuming hunger. The pine knots and bright birch logs fell to ash in a moment. If she slept, she dreamed that the stove was out, and the cold creeping into the cabin in long feathers of frost, that twisted under the door like snakes, until one touched her on the throat and she woke, choking.

Dawn found the sky fleeced with cloud, the cabin warm, and the hurt man yet alive.

Again with the day her heart lightened. Four—five hours from that time, and she might expect Garth with the doctor from the mines at Mandore. She wound the clock, and turned it with its chipped white face to the room, no longer dreading to tell the passage of the hours.

Yet five hours went, and Garth had not come.

She went to the door. Closing it behind her that the cold might not get into the cabin even for a moment, she stared down the trail. It ran in the straight no more than a half-mile; farther than that, she could not see. Yet it was less her eyes than her soul that she thus strained to see beyond the forest.

“Garth! Garth! Garth!”

Who had given that wild cry that rang among the trees? For a moment she wondered, then knew it had come from her own troubled heart.

She must see beyond the first bend of the trail; she must see if, farther than that, the blue-white ribbon between the trees was still empty of her hope.

She built up the fire again, put on coat and hood and snowshoes, took one glance at Derek, and left the cabin. She sped down the trail. She was panting when she reached the first curve. Almost afraid to look, she saw the long track before her—empty. There was something conscious and deliberate in that emptiness, as if the forest knowingly withheld from her a secret. She dared go no farther. She turned back and fled home.

The clock ticked off another hour—two, three, four. Garth had not come.

Darkness, and he had not come.

Loneliness and suspense were shaking her strong, young nerves. The worst of all was the silence. The voice of the stove became first an annoyance, then a weariness, then an intolerable burden. The voice of its devouring hunger was the very voice of silence, of desolation. She flung the wood in angrily. “If there was only someone to speak to,” she said, a little wildly—“just someone to give me a word!”

There was no one—then, nor through the endless night, when she feared to sleep, lest, in her dreams, or in reality, that insatiable thing in the stove that kept them alive might escape her, nor with the stormy dawn. Garth did not come.

There was no wood left in the house. Before she did anything else, she wrapped herself and went to the wood-pile.

The wood-pile was heaped against the back of the cabin: it was roofed and sheeted with snow. She pulled at the butt of a log, and the wood came down with a run, mixed with much snow—such dry snow that the wood was not moistened until she held it in her warm hand. The bitter work was a relief to her. She thrust the soft, dark hair out of her eyes and piled herself such a load that she swayed under it. “But it’s something to do for Derek,” she said, wistfully. “It’s all I can do.”

She took in enough for the day. But there was the night.

“Garth will be back by then,” she muttered, with cold lips, staring at the stove.

“Garth must be back by then.” The stove sent a screaming rush of flame up the pipe, as if in mockery. She felt an unreasoning hatred for it, as she went wearily out again to gather enough wood for the night too.

Kneeling beside the wood-pile, she groped with numbed hands. She felt nothing but snow.

She thrust in her arm to the shoulder. She met no resistance but that of the snow.

Her heart beat in shuddering throbs. She brought a long pole and prodded the pile, then swung the pole and levelled it. She found nothing but snow.

“How did it happen?” She heard herself asking this over and over. Easily enough. She or Garth or Derek had been drawing supplies from the other side of the pile, and the snow had slipped from the roof and filled the spaces; hardening, it had stretched a roof over emptiness. The pile, which had been taken for good, hardwood logs, fodder for that roaring hungry heat within, was no more than a heap of snow.

Dorette turned slowly, and went into the cabin.

She stood by Derek’s bunk, staring at the wood on the floor. It was enough for the day, but what of the night?

Would Garth return before the night?

She looked about the cabin. There were things there, things that would burn. Her sleepy brown eyes widened. There was war in them as she leaned and kissed Derek’s cheek. He did not stir from that deepening sleep of his.

“Sleep on, Derry,” she whispered, scarcely knowing what she said, “sleep well, Derry. I’ll take care of you, I’ll fight for you!”

She took Garth’s heavy axe, and began on the chairs.

They were heavy and clumsy things, Garth’s pride, since he had made them himself. They would feed the stove well; but they were hard for a girl’s arm to chop, even though she struck true as a woodman, and Dorette’s hands were scorched from the door of the stove. As she toiled, her eyes ranged the cabin, calculating on this box, that shelf, the table. Her heart beat to every sound. As the wind rose higher, the bitter day was full of sounds. A dozen times she ran to the door, crying, “Garth!” A dozen times she saw nothing but the forest and a driven mist of snow, as fine and dry as dust.

By the earliest dusk she had chopped up everything in the cabin. Each stroke sent a jar of pain to her shoulder from her burned and bruised hands, but she did not feel it. And still the stove roared, insatiable. The dried wood of their furnishings, pine for the most part, burned like straw. The great iron horror must be fed, and she had nothing to feed it.

She took the axe and went out.

The grey forest fronted her in a rustling drive of snow and shadow. There must be a hundred fallen boughs within range of the cabin. She found one, dragged it from the snow, and toiled with it into the house. She twisted it apart, desperately, and there was blood on the rough, broken stuff she thrust into the stove.

She went out again. She was growing more desperate as her strength failed. There was a great branch trailing from a spruce, and she tore and wrenched at it, but it would not yield—it was frozen. She swung her weight upon it, sobbing. She struck with all the force remaining in her, but the axe-blade turned in her weary hands. She felt as though the will in her, passionately strong, should sever the bough as by steel. She did not know she was beaten, until she slipped weakly and fell in the snow and lay there, wailing helplessly and softly as a child.

The bitter snow stung her face like heat—like the heat of the stove. If she stayed there, the stove would be out. She lifted herself to her knees, and saw in the growing dark a man, who stood with a rifle on his arm, looking down at her.

“Garth! Oh, Garth!”

But even as the cry left her lips, she knew it was not Garth.

A figure, lithe even under the heavy furs, a face hidden in the cowl he had drawn forward above his fur cap, a certain strange immobility that vaguely chilled her, but surely—help? So swift is thought, that in the transitory seconds before she spoke again her brain had shown her a picture, a memory of a wild-cat which she and Garth had vainly tried to corner in the yard—of the creature’s utter immobility until it launched itself and struck.

“The stove! Oh, the stove!”

She thought, as her hands went out to that motionless figure in the shadows, that she had spoken all the desperate appeal that was in her heart. But she only repeated: “Oh, the stove, the stove!”

“What stove?”

“The stove. The stove in our cabin. There’s—no more wood for it!”

She waited. Surely he understood. But he remained as he was, motionless, staring down at her.

She looked up at him with a burning appeal. She had forgotten to rise from her knees. She kneeled at his feet in the snow. Her breath came in gasps. “There,” she repeated, helplessly, “there—in the cabin—the stove! It’s going out!”

Still he waited.

“There’s a sick man there—my brother! Oh!” she finished, as he did not stir, “help me, if you’re a man!”

“Oh, b’gosh, yes, I’m a man!” She fancied that he was laughing in the shadow of the cowl. “But why should I help you?”

She had no more words. Silently she lifted and held out to him her bleeding hands.

After a long minute he stirred slowly. Without a word he laid his gun crosswise on two fir branches that grew above her reach, easily within his own. He lifted the axe from the snow. She watched him. Four sharp cross-cuts, and the trailing branch fell. He set his foot on it, chopped it quickly into four or five pieces. As each piece rolled free, Dorette snatched it as a starving woman might snatch bread.

“That enough?”

Staggering under her load, she stared at him. “No, no!” she stammered. “It’s not enough for the night. For the pity of Heaven, cut me some more!”

She turned away and hurried towards the cabin. Halfway there he overtook her. Without a word he lifted the logs from her arms into his own. She was too spent to thank him. Dumbly she moved at his side, conscious only that strength was here, help was here, that she might yet save Derek.

Entering the cabin, there was no glow, no light at all. With a low sound, Dorette swung open the door of the stove. Nothing was there but a handful of red ash ringed with grey.

With trembling hands she gathered a few splinters and thrust them in; she crouched before the gaunt, iron thing, as though she would hold it in her arms and warm it in her bosom. But the man, who had followed her, thrust her aside curtly enough. She watched him as he shaved a stick into delicate ribbons of wood—watched him as he coaxed them into flame. He tickled the appetite of the sullen, devouring thing in the stove with scraps of resinous bark and little twigs. Presently the fire laid hold on the larger logs, and fed upon them, hissing. He shut the door then, and turned to her.

She had lighted a lamp, and in the light stood looking at him, softly bright. Her eyes were stars of gratitude. She said at once: “My brother’s still living.”

She gestured towards the bunk. His eyes did not follow the gesture, or move from her pale face, as he said, abruptly: “You stay here with him. I’m goin’ to get you in some more wood.”

Her eyes flashed suddenly with tears. She said, brokenly: “You’re good. Oh, you’re a good man! While you’re—cuttin’ the wood, I’ll—thank God you came!”

He went out into the night without answering her.

He returned in half an hour, loaded mightily. Sitting on the end of her cot, she smiled at him, falteringly. She had been weeping.

He did not speak to her. Light-footed as a cat, he busied himself about the humming stove, then went forth again.

When he came back the second time, she was asleep.

Her face—very pale, very pure, fragile for one of her life and race—was rosed in the glow of the stove. Her hurt hands were curled within one another, like the hands of a child. Moving in his noiseless way, the man went again, and looked down at her.

His furred cowl had fallen back. His face also caught the light of the stove. Dark, keen, predatory, it was the face less of a man than of some embodied passion of hate or revenge, the face of an Ishmael, the face of Cain. It looked strange now, so little was it shaped or accustomed to the gentleness of expression it momentarily wore, as a breath blurs the gleam of steel. Light and silent as all his movements were, they showed no gentleness. But he seemed gentle when he lifted the end of one of Dorette’s dark plaits, which had fallen to the soiled floor, and laid it on the cot beside her just because he hesitated and was clumsy.

The plait of dark, silken hair was warm; his hand lingered over it. He leaned above her, and her breath was warm. That strangely unmoving regard of his was on her face. As if it had called her from her dreams, she woke, and lifted to him the clear eyes of a child. “I—did thank God—you came,” she whispered, with a child’s simplicity. Sleep held her again, almost before she had finished speaking.

The young man drew back, noiselessly lifted the axe, and once more went out.

Sinewy, silent, untiring, he toiled for her all night. And all night she slept.

She had slipped into unconsciousness as a child does, worn out with anxiety and fatigue. She woke a woman, and flushed to her hair, as she realized what she had done.

The man who had helped and guarded her all night, was standing in the doorway. The door was open; there was a frosty freshness in the air, which the roaring stove raised to the warmth of summer. The world outside was a dazzle of sun; silver drops rattled from the eaves; a crow called in the forest. It was the first sun of spring, the year’s change. In Dorette’s heart was a change also, a quickening, a birth of something new and unknown, that almost brought tears to her eyes. For the first time in her hard life she had rested on another’s strength; unconsciously she had found it sweet. That simple heart was in her look as she went to the stranger. She said, softly, “I did not mean to sleep. Why did you let me?”

He said, almost roughly; “You were all tired out.”

The tears brimmed over. She did not know if pain or happiness moved her. She went on: “I said—I knew—you were a good man.”

“Well,” he answered, but not as if he was answering her, “for one night.”

His furred hood hid his face. The wakening blush dyed her clear face again, as she said: “Let me see you. Let me see your face.”

“Why?”

On the word she faltered, confused. She did not know why. She stammered: “Because of what you have done—of what we owe you.”

“We?”

“My brothers and I. Derek’s still alive. I almost think he’s sleeping better—more natural. When—when Garth comes home, he’ll thank you as I’d like to.”

She looked up into the shadowed face, wistfully. He had turned from her again, and was gazing down the trail. After a moment, he said: “There’s coffee on the back of the stove, and some cornbread. You’d better eat it. I’ve had some.”

She went meekly, shamed that she had slept while her saviour served himself. She would have liked to serve him. Something strange and stormy was shaking her; she had no name for it. The food choked her, hungry as she was, but she ate it obediently.

She had scarcely finished, when he called her. She ran and joined him at the door. Something in his voice thrilled her; she saw in him again that strange and threatening immobility of the night before.

He said, swiftly: “You’re lookin’ for your brother to come back?”

“Yes, yes. Any time.”

“With another man?”

“With the doctor. Why?”

He raised his arm and pointed. In the blinding dazzle of sun on snow, she saw two small, dark figures, just rounding the curve of the trail.

Her heart rose and flooded her with a passion of thankfulness. She said, quietly, after a minute: “Yes, yes, it’s him and the doctor. Now—now, you’ll let him thank you, as you—won’t let me.”

Her words ended almost in a question, for she saw that, while she had been eating, he had taken his rifle on his arm and put on his snowshoes. Suddenly, she began to tremble a little, aware of something in his silence, his stillness, which vaguely threatened.

He swung upon her suddenly—one would have said, savagely, but that he was laughing. Those two black figures down the trail were sweeping rapidly nearer. All the latent fierceness of the man had flamed into being, at their approach. He laid a hard, slim hand on Dorette’s shoulder and turned her, so that, at less than arm’s length, she faced him. He said, softly, in the midst of his almost noiseless laughter: “I’ll show you how you can thank me.”

She looked up at him, her face colourless, her lips parted. In the shadow of the hood his eyes gleamed at her, his face bent nearer. The world fell away from her; there was nothing left in life for a minute but that face, that voice.

She just breathed: “Who are you?”

“You’ll know in a minute!” He looked swiftly from her to the two men down the trail. They were coming on fast. He seemed to be measuring his distance from them.

When they were so near that their faces were all but discernible, he caught the girl to him. She was slack in his hold; all her life seemed to be in her dazed eyes; she would have fallen, but that he held her with an arm like a steel bar. And twice and three times he kissed her.

“That’s how you can thank me!” He released her laughing still.

She staggered, her hands over her red mouth. With the movement of release he thrust her, rough and swift, within the door of the cabin. A bullet sent a spray of dusty snow over him. She saw, in one reeling instant, Garth on his knee down the trail, rifle levelled for another shot; the other, a laughing shadow, slipping from her hands, from her life, into the shadow of the forest from which he had come.

Another shot, wide of the mark; Garth leaping to his feet again and tearing towards her, followed by the doctor who was to save Derek, and whom he had found at last, thirty miles beyond Mandore. But she had no eyes for them—for a moment, no heart.

Eyes and heart were on that other figure at the edge of the trees, swift, terrible, laughing, calling to her with raised hand—

“Tell him you kissed Maxime Dufour!”

When Garth reached her side, she was on her knees, laughing and sobbing, striving, with her scarred small hands to obliterate his trail in the snow.