shouting, the logs kicking up the snow
behind the sled in a swirling, feathery wake.

At times he stayed at the bunk house with the lumberjacks, silent as they
were silent, or talking of trivial things which were mighty to them,--the
quality of the food, the depth of the snow, the fact that the little gray
squirrels were more plentiful in one part of the woods than another, or
that they chattered more in the morning than in the afternoon. Hours he
spent in watching Old Bill, a lumberjack who, in his few moments of
leisure between the supper table and bed, whittled laboriously upon a
wooden chain, which with dogged persistence he had lugged with him for
months. Or perhaps staring over the shoulder of Jade Hains, striving to
copy the picture of a motion-picture star from a worn, dirty, months-old
magazine; as excited as they over the tiny things in life, as eager to
seek a bunk when eight o'clock came, as grudging to hear the clatter of
alarm clocks in the black coldness before dawn and to creak forth to the
watering and harnessing of the horses for the work of the day. Some way,
it all seemed to be natural to Barry Houston, natural that he should
accept this sort of dogged, humdrum, eventless life and strive to think
of nothing more. The other existence, for him, had ended in a blackened
waste; even the one person in whom he had trusted, the woman he would
have been glad to marry, if that could have repaid her in any way for
what he thought she had done for him, had proved traitorous. His
letters, written to her at general delivery, St. Louis, had been
returned, uncalled for. From the moment that he had received that light,
taunting note, he had heard nothing more. She had done her work; she was
gone.

December came. Christmas, and with it Ba'tiste, with flour in his hair
and beard, his red shirt pulled out over his trousers, distributing the
presents which Houston had bought for the few men in his employ. January
wore on, bringing with it more snow. February and then--

"Eet is come! Eet is come!" Ba'tiste, waving his arms wildly, in spite
of the stuffiness of his heavy mackinaw, and the broad belt which sank
into layer after layer of clothing at his waist, came over the brow of
the raise into camp, to seize Houston in his arms and dance him about, to
lift him and literally throw him high upon his chest as one would toss a
child, to roar at Golemar, then to stand back, brandishing an opened
letter above hi