g! He laughed with joy again, and he forgot how
cold, how maliciously cold, he had been; he forgot how dreadful that
hour was before he became warm; when he was pierced by myriad needles
through the body, and there was an incredible aching at his heart.

And yet something kept thundering on his body, and a harsh voice
shrieked at him, and there were many lights dancing over his shut eyes;
and then curtains of darkness were dropped, and centuries of oblivion
came; and then--then his eyes opened to a comforting silence, and some
one was putting brandy between his teeth, and after a time he heard a
voice say: "'Bien,' you see he was a murderer, but he save his captor.
'Voila,' such a heathen! But you will, all the same, bring him to
justice--you call it that? But we shall see."

Then some one replied, and the words passed through an outer web of
darkness and an inner haze of dreams. "The feet of Little Hammer were
like wood on the floor when you brought the two in, Pretty Pierre--and
lucky for them you found them.... The thing would read right in a book,
but it's not according to the run of things up here, not by a damned
sight!"

"Private Bradshaw," said the first voice again, "you do not know Little
Hammer, nor that story of him. You wait for the trial. I have something
to say. You think Little Hammer care for the prison, the rope?--Ah, when
a man wait five years to kill--so! and it is done, he is glad sometimes
when it is all over. Sergeant Gellatly there will wish he went to sleep
forever in the snow, if Little Hammer come to the rope. Yes, I think."

And Sergeant Gellatly's brain was so numbed that he did not grasp the
meaning of the words, though he said them over and over again.... Was he
dead? No, for his body was beating, beating... well, it didn't matter...
nothing mattered... he was sinking to forgetfulness... sinking.

So, for hours, for weeks--it might have been for years--and then he
woke, clear and knowing, to "the unnatural, intolerable day"--it was
that to him, with Little Hammer in prison. It was March when his memory
and vigour vanished; it was May when he grasped the full remembrance of
himself, and of that fight for life on the prairie: of the hands that
smote him that he should not sleep; of Little Hammer the slayer, who had
driven death back discomfited, and brought his captor safe to where his
own captivity and punishment awaited him.

When Sergeant Gellatly appeared in court at the trial he re