he remainder
of the day he wielded an ax, saw and wedge in the hardwood, collecting
painfully--for his strength was not great--material for the constant
fires it was his duty to maintain. Often he would stand motionless in
the vast frozen, creaking forest, listening with awe to the voices which
spoke to him alone. There was something uncanny in the misshapen
dwarf with the fixed marble white face and the expressive changing
eyes,--something uncanny, and something indefinably beautiful.

He seemed to possess an instinct which warned him of the approach of
wild animals. Long before a white man, or even an Indian, would have
suspected the presence of game, little Phil would lift his head with a
peculiar listening toss. Soon, stepping daintily through the snow near
the swamp edge, would come a deer; or pat-apat-patting on his broad
hairy paws, a lynx would steal by. Except Injin Charley, Phil was the
only man in that country who ever saw a beaver in the open daylight.

At camp sometimes when all the men were away and his own work was done,
he would crouch like a raccoon in the far corner of his deep square bunk
with the board ends that made of it a sort of little cabin, and play to
himself softly on his violin. No one ever heard him. After supper he was
docilely ready to fiddle to the men's dancing. Always then he gradually
worked himself to a certain pitch of excitement. His eyes glared with
the wolf-gleam, and the music was vulgarly atrocious and out of tune.

As Christmas drew near, the weather increased in severity. Blinding
snow-squalls swept whirling from the northeast, accompanied by a high
wind. The air was full of it,--fine, dry, powdery, like the dust of
glass. The men worked covered with it as a tree is covered after a
sleet. Sometimes it was impossible to work at all for hours at a time,
but Thorpe did not allow a bad morning to spoil a good afternoon. The
instant a lull fell on the storm, he was out with his scaling rule,
and he expected the men to give him something to scale. He grappled the
fierce winter by the throat, and shook from it the price of success.

Then came a succession of bright cold days and clear cold nights.
The aurora gleamed so brilliantly that the forest was as bright as by
moonlight. In the strange weird shadow cast by its waverings the wolves
stole silently, or broke into wild ululations as they struck the trail
of game. Except for these weird invaders, the silence of death fell
on the