tepees, eat their raw frozen meat, with an
occasional glut of pemmican, and the thermometer 70 degrees below zero,
you get a lump in your throat.

"Then came one winter. I had one white man, two half-breeds, and an
Indian with me. There was darkness day after day, and because the
Esquimaux and Indians hadn't come up to the fort that winter, it was
lonely as a tomb. One by one the men got melancholy and then went mad,
and I had to tie them up, and care for them and feed them. The Indian
was all right, but he got afraid, and wanted to start to a mission
station three hundred miles on. It was a bad look-out for me, but I told
him to go. I was left alone. I was only twenty-one, but I was steel to
my toes--good for wear and tear. Well, I had one solid month all alone
with my madmen. Their jabbering made me sea-sick some times. At last one
day I felt I'd go staring mad myself if I didn't do something exciting
to lift me, as it were. I got a revolver, sat at the opposite end of the
room from the three lunatics, and practised shooting at them. I had got
it into my head that they ought to die, but it was only fair, I thought,
to give them a chance. I would try hard to shoot all round them--make a
halo of bullets for the head of every one, draw them in silhouettes of
solid lead on the wall.

"I talked to them first, and told them what I was going to do. They
seemed to understand, and didn't object. I began with the silhouettes,
of course. I had a box of bullets beside me. They never squealed. I sent
the bullets round them as pretty as the pattern of a milliner. Then I
began with their heads. I did two all right. They sat and never stirred.
But when I came to the last something happened. It was Jock Lawson."

Sir William interposed:

"Jock Lawson--Jock Lawson from here?"

"Yes. His mother keeps 'The Whisk o' Barley.'"

"So, that is where Jock Lawson went? He followed your father?"

"Yes. Jock was mad enough when I began--clean gone. But, somehow, the
game I was playing cured him. 'Steady, Jock!' I said. 'Steady!' for I
saw him move. I levelled for the second bead of the halo. My finger was
on the trigger. 'My God, don't shoot!' he called. It startled me, my
hand shook, the thing went off, and Jock had a bullet through his brain.

"... Then I waked up. Perhaps I had been mad myself--I don't know. But
my brain never seemed clearer than when I was playing that game. It was
like a magnifying glass: and my eyes were so clear a