on the Divide. Canute stumbled into his
shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove, sat
down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire, staring
drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by heart every
individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that
stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness
of its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had
seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by
drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in
the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones
that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it
stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily as
though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into the
hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw before the
shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill themselves, and the
snow flakes were settling down over the white leprous patches of frozen
earth where the hogs had gnawed even the sod away. He shuddered and
began to walk, trampling heavily with his ungainly feet. He was the
wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he knew what that meant. Men fear
the winters of the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North
Seas fear the still dark cold of the polar twilight. His eyes fell upon
his gun, and he took it down from the wall and looked it over. He
sat down on the edge of his bed and held the barrel towards his face,
letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid his finger on the trigger.
He was perfectly calm, there was neither passion nor despair in his
face, but the thoughtful look of a man who is considering. Presently
he laid down the gun, and reaching into the cupboard, drew out a pint
bottle of raw white alcohol. Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily.
He washed his face in the tin basin and combed his rough hair and
shaggy blond beard. Then he stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark
clothes that hung on the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in
his hands and tried to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper
collar that was pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped
it under his rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the
cracked, splashed glass that hung ove