d killed. He had known one--Pelletier, up at
Point Fullerton, on the Arctic. He could repeat by heart the diary
Pelletier had left scribbled on his cabin door. It was worse than
madness. To Pelletier death had come at last as a friend. And Bram had
been like that--dead to human comradeship for years. And yet--

Under it all, in Philip's mind, ran the thought of the woman's hair. In
Pierre Breault's cabin he had not given voice to the suspicion that had
flashed upon him. He had kept it to himself, and Pierre, afraid to
speak because of the horror of it, had remained as silent as he. The
thought oppressed him now. He knew that human hair retained its life
and its gloss indefinitely, and that Bram might have had the golden
snare for years. It was quite reasonable to suppose that he had
bartered for it with some white man in the years before he had become
an outlaw, and that some curious fancy or superstition had inspired him
in its possession. But Philip had ceased to be influenced by reason
alone. Sharply opposed to reason was that consciousness within him
which told him that the hair had been freshly cut from a woman's head.
He had no argument with which to drive home the logic of this belief
even with himself, and yet he found it impossible not to accept that
belief fully and unequivocally. There was, or HAD been, a woman with
Bram--and as he thought of the length and beauty and rare texture of
the silken strand in his pocket he could not repress a shudder at the
possibilities the situation involved. Bram--and a woman! And a woman
with hair like that!

He left his tree after a time. For another hour he paced slowly back
and forth at the edge of the Barren, his senses still keyed to the
highest point of caution. Then he rebuilt his fire, pausing every few
moments in the operation to listen for a suspicious sound. It was very
cold. He noticed, after a little, that the weird sound of the lights
over the Pole had become only a ghostly whisper. The stars were growing
dimmer, and he watched them as they seemed slowly to recede farther and
farther away from the world of which he was a part. This dying out of
the stars always interested him. It was one of the miracles of the
northern world that lay just under the long Arctic night which, a few
hundred miles beyond the Barren, was now at its meridian. It seemed to
him as though ten thousand invisible hands were sweeping under the
heavens extinguishing the lights first in ones a