le cuss!" said Falkner. "He's sure got his nerve!"

He went on eating his beans, and when he had done he lighted a lamp,
for the half Arctic darkness was falling early, and began to clear away
the dishes. When he had done he put a scrap of bannock and a few beans
on the corner of the table.

"I'll bet he's hungry, the little cuss," he said. "A thousand miles--in
that box!"

He sat down close to the sheet-iron box stove, which was glowing
red-hot, and filled his pipe. Kerosene was a precious commodity, and he
had turned down the lamp wick until he was mostly in gloom. Outside a
storm was wailing down across the Barrens from the North. He could hear
the swish of the spruce-boughs overhead, and those moaning,
half-shrieking sounds that always came with storm from out of the
North, and sometimes fooled even him into thinking they were human
cries. They had seemed more and more human to him during the past three
days, and he was growing afraid. Once or twice strange thoughts had
come into his head, and he had tried to fight them down. He had known
of men whom loneliness had driven mad--and he was terribly lonely. He
shivered as a piercing blast of wind filled with a mourning wail swept
over the cabin.

And that day, too, he had been taken with a touch of fever. It burned
more hotly in his blood to-night, and he knew that it was the
loneliness--the emptiness of the world about him, the despair and black
foreboding that came to him with the first early twilights of the Long
Night. For he was in the edge of that Long Night. For weeks he would
only now and then catch a glimpse of the sun. He shuddered.

A hundred and fifty miles to the south and east there was a Hudson's
Bay post. Eighty miles south was the nearest trapper's cabin he knew
of. Two months before he had gone down to the post, with a thick beard
to cover his face, and had brought back supplies--and the box. His wife
had sent up the box to him, only it had come to him as "John Blake"
instead of Jim Falkner, his right name. There were things in it for him
to wear, and pictures of the sweet-faced wife who was still filled with
prayer and hope for him, and of the kid, their boy. "He is walking
now," she had written to him, "and a dozen times a day he goes to your
picture and says 'Pa-pa--Pa-pa'--and every night we talk about you
before we go to bed, and pray God to send you back to us soon."

"God bless 'em!" breathed Jim.

He had not lighted his pipe, and there