In a Far Country
When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forgetmany of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as areinherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old idealsand the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes bywhich his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have theprotean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even bea source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to theruts in which they were created, the pressure of the alteredenvironment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit underthe new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing isbound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to variousmisfortunes. It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to thenew groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he willsurely 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, mayestimate success at an inverse ratio to the quantity and quality of hishopelessly fixed habits. He will soon discover, if he be a fitcandidate, that the material habits are the less important. Theexchange of such things as a dainty menu for rough fare, of the stiffleather shoe for the soft, shapeless moccasin, of the feather bed for acouch in the snow, is after all a very easy matter. But his pinch willcome in learning properly to shape his mind's attitude toward allthings, and especially toward his fellow man. For the courtesies ofordinary life, he must substitute unselfishness, forbearance, andtolerance. Thus, and thus only, can he gain that pearl of greatprice--true comradeship. He must not say 'thank you'; he must mean itwithout opening his mouth, and prove it by responding in kind. Inshort, he must substitute the deed for the word, the spirit for theletter.
When the world rang with the tale of Arctic gold, and the lure of theNorth gripped the heartstrings of men, Carter Weatherbee threw up hissnug clerkship, turned the half of his savings over to his wife, andwith the remainder bought an outfit. There was no romance in hisnature--the bondage of commerce had crushed all that; he was simplytired of the ceaseless grind, and wished to risk great hazards in viewof corresponding returns. Like many another fool, disdaining the oldtrails used by the Northland pioneers for a score of years, he hurriedto Edmonton in the spring of the year; and there, unluckily for hissoul's welfare, he allied himself with a party of men.
There was nothing unusual about this party, except its plans. Even itsgoal, like that of all the other parties, was the Klondike. But theroute it had mapped out to attain that goal took away the breath of thehardiest 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 thesixty-fifth parallel, and had the same hushed by blissful sucks of rawtallow), was surprised. Though he sold his services to them and agreedto travel 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, for he,too, joined this company of argonauts. He was an ordinary man, with abank account as deep as his culture, which is saying a good deal. Hehad no reason to embark on such a venture--no reason in the world savethat he suffered from an abnormal development of sentimentality. Hemistook this for the true spirit of romance and adventure. Many anotherman has done the like, and made as fatal a mistake.
The first break-up of spring found the party following the ice-run ofElk River. It was an imposing fleet, for the outfit was large, and theywere accompanied by a disreputable contingent of half-breed voyageurswith their women and children. Day in and day out, they labored withthe bateaux and canoes, fought mosquitoes and other kindred pests, orsweated and swore at the portages. Severe toil like this lays a mannaked to the very roots of his soul, and ere Lake Athabasca was lost inthe south, each member of the party had hoisted his true colors.
The two shirks and chronic grumblers were Carter Weatherbee and PercyCuthfert. The whole party complained less of its aches and pains thandid either of them. Not once did they volunteer for the thousand andone petty duties of the camp. A bucket of water to be brought, an extraarmful of wood to be chopped, the dishes to be washed and wiped, asearch to be made through the outfit for some suddenly indispensablearticle--and these two effete scions of civilization discovered sprainsor blisters requiring instant 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 start should bein readiness before the breakfast was begun.
They were the first to fall to at mealtime, the last to have a hand inthe cooking; the first to dive for a slim delicacy, the last todiscover they had added to their own another man's share. If theytoiled at the oars, they slyly cut the water at each stroke and allowedthe 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 tillnight. But Jacques Baptiste was no gentleman.
At the Great Slave, Hudson Bay dogs were purchased, and the fleet sankto the guards with its added burden of dried fish and pemican. Thencanoe and bateau answered to the swift current of the Mackenzie, andthey plunged into the Great Barren Ground. Every likely-looking'feeder' was prospected, but the elusive 'pay-dirt' danced ever to thenorth. At the Great Bear, overcome by the common dread of the UnknownLands, their voyageurs began to desert, and Fort of Good Hope saw thelast and bravest bending to the towlines as they bucked the currentdown which they had so treacherously glided.
Jacques Baptiste alone remained. Had he not sworn to travel even to thenever-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 itsnorthern solstice and was leading the winter south again. Skirting theshores of the bay, where the Mackenzie disembogues into the ArcticOcean, they entered the mouth of the Little Peel River. Then began thearduous up-stream toil, and the two Incapables fared worse than ever.Towline and pole, paddle and tumpline, rapids and portages--suchtortures served to give the one a deep disgust for great hazards, andprinted for the other a fiery text on the true romance of adventure.One day they waxed mutinous, and being vilely cursed by JacquesBaptiste, turned, as worms sometimes will. But the half-breed thrashedthe twain, and sent them, bruised and bleeding, about their work. Itwas the first time either had been manhandled.
Abandoning their river craft at the headwaters of the Little Peel, theyconsumed the rest of the summer in the great portage over the Mackenziewatershed to the West Rat. This little stream fed the Porcupine, whichin turn joined the Yukon where that mighty highway of the Northcountermarches on the Arctic Circle.
But they had lost in the race with winter, and one day they tied theirrafts to the thick eddy-ice and hurried their goods ashore. That nightthe river jammed and broke several times; the following morning it hadfallen asleep for good. 'We can't be more'n four hundred miles from theYukon,' concluded Sloper, multiplying his thumb nails by the scale ofthe map. The council, in which the two Incapables had whined toexcellent disadvantage, was drawing to a close.
'Hudson Bay Post, long time ago. No use um now.' Jacques Baptiste'sfather 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?' 'Narywhite,' Sloper sententiously affirmed; 'but it's only five hundred moreup the Yukon to Dawson. Call it a rough thousand from here.' Weatherbeeand 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. Umbabies come' (designating the Incapables), 'no can tell. Mebbe whenhell freeze over; mebbe not then.' The manufacture of snowshoes andmoccasins ceased. Somebody called the name of an absent member, whocame out of an ancient cabin at the edge of the campfire and joinedthem. The cabin wa
s 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 contained thesecret of those early wanderers. But whose hand had piled the stones?The moment had come. Jacques Baptiste paused in the fitting of aharness and pinned the struggling dog in the snow. The cook made muteprotest 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 aludicrous contrast to the healthy physiques of the Incapables. Yellowand weak, fleeing from a South American fever-hole, he had not brokenhis flight across the zones, and was still able to toil with men. Hisweight was probably ninety pounds, with the heavy hunting knife thrownin, and his grizzled hair told of a prime which had ceased to be. Thefresh young muscles of either Weatherbee or Cuthfert were equal to tentimes the endeavor of his; yet he could walk them into the earth in aday's journey. And all this day he had whipped his stronger comradesinto venturing a thousand miles of the stiffest hardship man canconceive. He was the incarnation of the unrest of his race, and the oldTeutonic stubbornness, dashed with the quick grasp and action of theYankee, 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 trailof oaths along many a hundred miles of pain.
'Contrary minded?' 'No!' For the first time the Incapables were unitedwithout 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 canmanage 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 chaplike 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 itwith that canoodlin' pardner of yourn,' suggested a heavy-goingWesterner 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 tocookin' 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 geteverything in running order and remember if we've forgotten anything.'The sleds groaned by on their steel-shod runners, and the dogs strainedlow in the harnesses in which they were born to die.
Jacques Baptiste paused by the side of Sloper to get a last glimpse ofthe 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?' 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 that cabinall winter--a mighty long, dark winter. Kilkenny cats--well?' TheFrenchman in Baptiste shrugged his shoulders, but the Indian in him wassilent. Nevertheless, it was an eloquent shrug, pregnant with prophecy.Things prospered in the little cabin at first. The rough badinage oftheir comrades had made Weatherbee and Cuthfert conscious of the mutualresponsibility which had devolved upon them; besides, there was not somuch work after all for two healthy men. And the removal of the cruelwhiphand, or in other words the bulldozing half-breed, had brought withit a joyous reaction. At first, each strove to outdo the other, andthey performed petty tasks with an unction which would have opened theeyes of their comrades who were now wearing out bodies and souls on theLong Trail.
All care was banished. The forest, which shouldered in upon them fromthree sides, was an inexhaustible woodyard. A few yards from their doorslept the Porcupine, and a hole through its winter robe formed abubbling spring of water, crystal clear and painfully cold. But theysoon grew to find fault with even that. The hole would persist infreezing up, and thus gave them many a miserable hour of ice-chopping.The unknown builders of the cabin had extended the sidelogs so as tosupport a cache at the rear. In this was stored the bulk of the party'sprovisions.
Food there was, without stint, for three times the men who were fatedto live upon it. But the most of it was the kind which built up brawnand sinew, but did not tickle the palate.
True, there was sugar in plenty for two ordinary men; but these twowere little else than children. They early discovered the virtues ofhot water judiciously saturated with sugar, and they prodigally swamtheir flapjacks and soaked their crusts in the rich, white syrup.
Then coffee and tea, and especially the dried fruits, made disastrousinroads upon it. The first words they had were over the sugar question.And it is a really serious thing when two men, wholly dependent uponeach 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 onas best it might, either ignored the subject or delivered himself ofstartling epigrams. But the clerk was too obtuse to appreciate theclever shaping of thought, and this waste of ammunition irritatedCuthfert.
He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy, and it workedhim quite a hardship, this loss of an audience. He felt personallyaggrieved and unconsciously held his muttonhead companion responsiblefor it.
Save existence, they had nothing in common--came in touch on no singlepoint.
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 alittle. The one was a lower-class man who considered himself agentleman, 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 withoutpossessing the first instinct of true comradeship. The clerk was assensuous as the other was aesthetic, and his love adventures, told atgreat length and chiefly coined from his imagination, affected thesupersensitive master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs ofsewer gas. He deemed the clerk a filthy, uncultured brute, whose placewas in the muck with the swine, and told him so; and he wasreciprocally informed that he was a milk-and-water sissy and a cad.Weatherbee could not have defined 'cad' for his life; but it satisfiedits purpose, which after all seems the main point in life.
Weatherbee flatted every third note and sang such songs as 'The BostonBurglar' and 'the Handsome Cabin Boy,' for hours at a time, whileCuthfert wept with rage, till he could stand it no longer and fled intothe outer cold. But there was no escape. The intense frost could not beendured 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 presenceof either became a personal affront to the other, and they lapsed intosullen silences which increased in length and strength as the days wentby. Occasionally, the flash of an eye or the curl of a lip got thebetter of them, though they strove to wholly ignore each other duringthese mute periods.
And a great wonder sprang up in the breast of each, as to how God hadever come to create the other.
With little to do, time became an intolerable burden to them. Thisnaturally made them still lazier. They sank into a physical lethargywhich there was no escaping, and which made them rebel at theperformance of the smallest chore. One morning when it was his turn tocook the common breakfast, Weatherbee rolled out of his blankets, andto the snoring of his companion, lighted first the slush lamp and thenthe fire. The kettles were frozen hard, and there was no water in thecabin with which to wash. But he did not mind that. Waiting for it tothaw, he sliced the bacon and plunged into the hateful task ofbread-making. Cuthfert had been slyly watching through his half-closedlids.
Consequently there was a scene, in which they fervently blessed eachothe
r, and agreed, henceforth, that each do his own cooking. A weeklater, Cuthfert neglected his morning ablutions, but none the lesscomplacently 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 beafraid they were not getting their proper shares, and in order thatthey might not be robbed, they fell to gorging themselves. The luxuriessuffered in this gluttonous contest, as did also the men.
In the absence of fresh vegetables and exercise, their blood becameimpoverished, 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 theother'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 bedsmade or fresh pine boughs laid underneath. Yet they could not keep totheir blankets, as they would have wished; for the frost wasinexorable, and the fire box consumed much fuel. The hair of theirheads and faces grew long and shaggy, while their garments would havedisgusted a ragpicker. But they did not care. They were sick, and therewas 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 Fearwas the joint child of the Great Cold and the Great Silence, and wasborn in the darkness of December, when the sun dipped below the horizonfor good. It affected them according to their natures.
Weatherbee fell prey to the grosser superstitions, and did his best toresurrect the spirits which slept in the forgotten graves. It was afascinating thing, and in his dreams they came to him from out of thecold, and snuggled into his blankets, and told him of their toils andtroubles ere they died. He shrank away from the clammy contact as theydrew closer and twined their frozen limbs about him, and when theywhispered in his ear of things to come, the cabin rang with hisfrightened shrieks. Cuthfert did not understand--for they no longerspoke--and when thus awakened he invariably grabbed for his revolver.Then he would sit up in bed, shivering nervously, with the weapontrained 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 whohad laid the cabin, log by log, had pegged a wind-vane to theridgepole. Cuthfert noticed it always pointed south, and one day,irritated by its steadfastness of purpose, he turned it toward theeast. 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 ittill the wind did blow. But the air frightened him with its unearthlycalm, and he often rose in the middle of the night to see if the vanehad veered--ten degrees would have satisfied him. But no, it poisedabove him as unchangeable as fate.
His imagination ran riot, till it became to him a fetish. Sometimes hefollowed the path it pointed across the dismal dominions, and allowedhis soul to become saturated with the Fear. He dwelt upon the unseenand the unknown till the burden of eternity appeared to be crushinghim. Everything in the Northland had that crushing effect--the absenceof life and motion; the darkness; the infinite peace of the broodingland; 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 could compass.
The world he had so recently left, with its busy nations and greatenterprises, seemed very far away. Recollections occasionallyobtruded--recollections of marts and galleries and crowdedthoroughfares, of evening dress and social functions, of good men anddear women he had known--but they were dim memories of a life he hadlived long centuries agone, on some other planet. This phantasm was theReality. Standing beneath the wind-vane, his eyes fixed on the polarskies, he could not bring himself to realize that the Southland reallyexisted, 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 andtaking in marriage.
Beyond his bleak skyline there stretched vast solitudes, and beyondthese 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 Westand the spicelands of the East, the smiling Arcadias and blissfulIslands of the Blest--ha! ha! His laughter split the void and shockedhim 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 ofsome forgotten crime.
He lived with Death among the dead, emasculated by the sense of his owninsignificance, crushed by the passive mastery of the slumbering ages.The magnitude of all things appalled him. Everything partook of thesuperlative save himself--the perfect cessation of wind and motion, theimmensity of the snow-covered wildness, the height of the sky and thedepth of the silence. That wind-vane--if it would only move. If athunderbolt 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 Fearof the North laid icy fingers on his heart.
Once, like another Crusoe, by the edge of the river he came upon atrack--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 upon it,gloat over it.
He forgot his swollen muscles, plunging through the deep snow in anecstasy of anticipation. The forest swallowed him up, and the briefmidday twilight vanished; but he pursued his quest till exhaustednature asserted itself and laid him helpless in the snow.
There he groaned and cursed his folly, and knew the track to be thefancy of his brain; and late that night he dragged himself into thecabin on hands and knees, his cheeks frozen and a strange numbnessabout his feet. Weatherbee grinned malevolently, but made no offer tohelp him. He thrust needles into his toes and thawed them out by thestove. A week later mortification set in.
But the clerk had his own troubles. The dead men came out of theirgraves more frequently now, and rarely left him, waking or sleeping. Hegrew to wait and dread their coming, never passing the twin cairnswithout a shudder. One night they came to him in his sleep and led himforth to an appointed task. Frightened into inarticulate horror, heawoke between the heaps of stones and fled wildly to the cabin. But hehad lain there for some time, for his feet and cheeks were also frozen.
Sometimes he became frantic at their insistent presence, and dancedabout the cabin, cutting the empty air with an axe, and smashingeverything within reach.
During these ghostly encounters, Cuthfert huddled into his blankets andfollowed the madman about with a cocked revolver, ready to shoot him ifhe came too near.
But, recovering from one of these spells, the clerk noticed the weapontrained upon him.
His suspicions were aroused, and thenceforth he, too, lived in fear ofhis life. They watched each other closely after that, and faced aboutin startled fright whenever either passed behind the other's back. Theapprehensiveness became a mania which controlled them even in theirsleep. Through mutual fear they tacitly let the slush-lamp burn allnight, and saw to a plentiful supply of bacon-grease before retiring.The slightest movement on the part of one was sufficient to arouse theother, and many a still watch their gazes countered as they shookbeneath their blankets with fingers on the trigger-guards.
What with the Fear of the North, the mental strain, and the ravages ofthe disease, they lost all semblance of humanity, taking on theappearance of wild beasts, hunted and desperate. Their cheeks andnoses, as an aftermath of the freezing, had turned black.
Their frozen toes had begun to drop away at the first and secondjoints. Every movement brought pain, but the
fire box was insatiable,wringing a ransom of torture from their miserable bodies. Day in, dayout, it demanded its food--a veritable pound of flesh--and they draggedthemselves into the forest to chop wood on their knees. Once, crawlingthus in search of dry sticks, unknown to each other they entered athicket from opposite sides.
Suddenly, without warning, two peering death's-heads confronted eachother. Suffering had so transformed them that recognition wasimpossible. They sprang to their feet, shrieking with terror, anddashed away on their mangled stumps; and falling at the cabin's door,they clawed and scratched like demons till they discovered theirmistake.
Occasionally they lapsed normal, and during one of these saneintervals, the chief bone of contention, the sugar, had been dividedequally between them. They guarded their separate sacks, stored up inthe 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 withpain, 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 hadsome time since passed its lowest southern declination, and at meridiannow threw flaunting streaks of yellow light upon the northern sky. Onthe day following his mistake with the sugar-bag, Cuthfert foundhimself feeling better, both in body and in spirit. As noontime drewnear and the day brightened, he dragged himself outside to feast on theevanescent glow, which was to him an earnest of the sun's futureintentions. Weatherbee was also feeling somewhat better, and crawledout beside him. They propped themselves in the snow beneath themoveless wind-vane, and waited.
The stillness of death was about them. In other climes, when naturefalls into such moods, there is a subdued air of expectancy, a waitingfor 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 ofthe future. This unearthly calm had always been--the tranquil silenceof eternity.
Their eyes were fixed upon the north. Unseen, behind their backs,behind the towering mountains to the south, the sun swept toward thezenith of another sky than theirs. Sole spectators of the mightycanvas, they watched the false dawn slowly grow. A faint flame began toglow and smoulder. It deepened in intensity, ringing the changes ofreddish-yellow, purple, and saffron. So bright did it become thatCuthfert thought the sun must surely be behind it--a miracle, the sunrising in the north! Suddenly, without warning and without fading, thecanvas was swept clean. There was no color in the sky. The light hadgone out of the day.
They caught their breaths in half-sobs. But lo! the air was aglint withparticles of scintillating frost, and there, to the north, thewind-vane lay in vague outline of the snow.
A shadow! A shadow! It was exactly midday. They jerked their headshurriedly to the south. A golden rim peeped over the mountain's snowyshoulder, smiled upon them an instant, then dipped from sight again.
There were tears in their eyes as they sought each other. A strangesoftening came over them. They felt irresistibly drawn toward eachother. 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 itwould ride their heaven day and night, never once dropping below theskyline. There would be no night.
The ice-locked winter would be broken; the winds would blow and theforests answer; the land would bathe in the blessed sunshine, and liferenew.
Hand in hand, they would quit this horrid dream and journey back to theSouthland. They lurched blindly forward, and their hands met--theirpoor maimed hands, swollen and distorted beneath their mittens.
But the promise was destined to remain unfulfilled. The Northland isthe Northland, and men work out their souls by strange rules, whichother men, who have not journeyed into far countries, cannot come tounderstand.
An hour later, Cuthfert put a pan of bread into the oven, and fell tospeculating on what the surgeons could do with his feet when he gotback. Home did not seem so very far away now. Weatherbee was rummagingin the cache. Of a sudden, he raised a whirlwind of blasphemy, which inturn ceased with startling abruptness. The other man had robbed hissugar-sack. Still, things might have happened differently, had not thetwo dead men come out from under the stones and hushed the hot words inhis throat. 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 guided himgently, very gently, to the woodpile, where they put the axe in hishands.
Then they helped him shove open the cabin door, and he felt sure theyshut it after him--at least he heard it slam and the latch fall sharplyinto place. And he knew they were waiting just without, waiting for himto do his task.
'Carter! I say, Carter!' Percy Cuthfert was frightened at the look onthe clerk's face, and he made haste to put the table between them.
Carter Weatherbee followed, without haste and without enthusiasm. Therewas neither pity nor passion in his face, but rather the patient,stolid look of one who has certain work to do and goes about itmethodically.
'I say, what's the matter?'
The clerk dodged back, cutting off his retreat to the door, but neveropening his mouth.
'I say, Carter, I say; let's talk. There's a good chap.' The master ofarts was thinking rapidly, now, shaping a skillful flank movement onthe 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 swunghis weapon and leaped forward. The axe bit deeply at the base of thespine, and Percy Cuthfert felt all consciousness of his lower limbsleave him. Then the clerk fell heavily upon him, clutching him by thethroat with feeble fingers. The sharp bite of the axe had causedCuthfert to drop the pistol, and as his lungs panted for release, hefumbled aimlessly for it among the blankets. Then he remembered. Heslid a hand up the clerk's belt to the sheath-knife; and they drew veryclose to each other in that last clinch.
Percy Cuthfert felt his strength leave him. The lower portion of hisbody was useless, The inert weight of Weatherbee crushed him--crushedhim and pinned him there like a bear under a trap. The cabin becamefilled with a familiar odor, and he knew the bread to be burning. Yetwhat did it matter? He would never need it. And there were all of sixcupfuls of sugar in the cache--if he had foreseen this he would nothave been so saving the last several days. Would the wind-vane evermove? 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 wasforcing in.
It must be below zero already, and the ice creeping up the inside ofthe door. He could not see it, but his past experience enabled him togauge its progress by the cabin's temperature. The lower hinge must bewhite ere now. Would the tale of this ever reach the world? How wouldhis 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, 'PoorOld Cuthfert,' they murmured; 'not such a bad sort of a chap, afterall.' He smiled 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 shave would notbe bad. No; he would eat first.
Steak, and potatoes, and green things how fresh it all was! And whatwas that? Squares of honey, streaming liquid amber! But why did theybring so much? Ha! ha! he could never eat it all.
Shine! Why certainly. He put his foot on the box. The bootblack lookedcuriously up at him, and he remembered his moosehide moccasins and wentaway hastily.
Hark! The wind-vane must be surely spinning. No; a mere singing in hisears.
That was all--a me
re singing. The ice must have passed the latch bynow. More likely the upper hinge was covered. Between the moss-chinkedroof-poles, little points of frost began to appear. How slowly theygrew! No; not so slowly. There was a new one, and there another.Two--three--four; they were coming too fast to count. There were twogrowing 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 theNorth, they would stand together, hand in hand, before the great WhiteThrone. And God would judge them, God would judge them!
Then Percy Cuthfert closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.