less, to catch what words might
escape the Shaman during the fit, for these were omens of deep
significance.

When at last the convulsive movements quieted, and the Shaman lay like
one dead, except for an occasional faint twitch, the Boy realised for
the first time that the sick man, too, was dumb. Dead? The only sound
now was the wind up in the world above. Even the dog was still.

The silence was more horrible than the hell-let-loose of a few minutes
before.

The dim group sat there, motionless, under the spell of the stillness
even more than they had been under the spell of the noise. At last a
queer, indescribable scratching and scraping came up out of the bowels
of the earth.

How does the old devil manage to do that? thought the Boy. But the
plain truth was that his heart was in his mouth, for the sound came
from the opposite direction, behind the Boy, and not near the Shaman at
all. It grew louder, came nearer, more inexplicable, more awful. He
felt he could not bear it another minute, sprang up, and stood there,
tense, waiting for what might befall. Were _all_ the others dead, then?

Not a sound in the place, only that indescribable stirring of something
in the solid earth under his feet.

The Shaman had his knife. A ghastly sensation of stifling came over the
Boy as he thought of a struggle down there under the earth and the
snow.

On came the horrible underground thing. Desperately the Boy stirred the
almost extinct embers with his foot, and a faint glow fell on the
terror-frozen faces of the natives, fell on the bear-skin flap. _It
moved!_ A huge hand came stealing round. A hand? The skeleton of a
hand--white, ghastly, with fingers unimaginably long. No mortal in
Pymeut had a hand like that--no mortal in all the world!

A crisp, smart sound, and a match blazed. A tall, lean figure rose up
from behind the bear-skin and received the sudden brightness full in
his face, pale and beautiful, but angry as an avenging angel's. For an
instant the Boy still thought it a spectre, the delusion of a
bewildered brain, till the girl cried out, "Brother Paul!" and fell
forward on the floor, hiding her face in her hands.

"Light! make a light!" he commanded. Nicholas got up, dazed but
obedient, and lit the seal-oil lamp.

The voice of the white man, the call for light, reached the Shaman. He
seemed to shiver and shrink under the folds of the Kamlayka. But
instead of getting up and looking his enemy in the face, h