"Ah, the Great God!" cried Jan's tortured soul when it was all over.
"At least she shall not work for the dirty Englishman."

First he awoke the factor, and told him what he had done. Then he went
to Williams, and after that, one by one, these three visited the four
other white and part white men at the post. They lived very near to the
earth, these seven, and the spirit of the golden rule was as natural to
their living as green sap to the trees. So they stood shoulder to
shoulder to Jan in a scheme that appalled them, and in the very first
day of this scheme they saw the woman blossoming forth in her old
beauty and joy, and at times fleeting visions of the old happiness at
the post came to these lonely men who were searing their souls for her.
But to Jan one vision came to destroy all others, and as the old light
returned to the woman's eyes, the glad smile to her lips, the sweetness
of thankfulness and faith into her voice, this vision hurt him until he
rolled and tossed in agony at night, and by day his feet were never
still. His search for Cummins now had something of madness in it. It
was his one hope--where to the other six there was no hope. And one day
this spark went out of him. The crust was gone. The snow was settling.
Beyond the lake he found the chasm between the two mountains, and,
miles of this chasm, robbed to the bones of flesh, he found Cummins.
The bones, and Cummins' gun, and all that was left of him, he buried in
a crevasse.

He waited until night to return to the post. Only one light was burning
when he came out into the clearing, and that was the light in the
woman's cabin. In the edge of the balsams he sat down to watch it, as
he had watched it a hundred nights before. Suddenly something came
between him and the light. Against the cabin he saw the shadow of a
human form, and as silently as the steely flash of the Aurora over his
head, as swiftly as a lean deer, he sped through the gloom of the
forest's edge and came up behind the home of the woman and her child.
With the caution of a lynx, his head close to the snow, he peered
around the end of the logs. It was the Englishman who stood looking
through the tear in the curtained window! Jan's moccasined feet made no
sound. His hand fell as gently as a child's upon the Englishman's arm.

"Thees is not the honor of the Beeg Snows!" he whispered. "Come."

A sickly pallor filled the Englishman's face. But Jan's voice was soft
and dispassionate,