ful geography of men. A
traveller on this trail is not always sure whether he is following the
mighty Yukon or some slough equally mighty for a few miles, or whether,
in the protracted twilight, he has not wandered off upon some frozen
swamp.

On the Boy went in the ghostly starlight, running, stumbling, calling
at regular intervals, his voice falling into a melancholy monotony that
sounded foreign to himself. It occurred to him that were he the Colonel
he wouldn't recognise it, and he began instead to call "Kentucky!
Ken-tuck-kee!" sounding those fine barbaric syllables for the first
time, most like, in that world of ice and silence.

He stood an instant after his voice died, and listened to the quiet.
Yes, the people were right who said nothing was so hard to bear in this
country of hardship--nothing ends by being so ghastly--as the silence.
No bird stirs. The swift-flashing fish are sealed under ice, the wood
creatures gone to their underground sleep. No whispering of the pointed
firs, stiff, snowclotted; no swaying of the scant herbage sheathed in
ice or muffled under winter's wide white blanket. No greater hush can
reign in the interstellar spaces than in winter on the Yukon.

"Colonel!"

Silence--like a negation of all puny things, friendship, human life--

"Colonel!"

Silence. No wonder men went mad up here, when they didn't drown this
silence in strong drink.

On and on he ran, till he felt sure he must have passed the Colonel,
unless--yes, there were those air-holes in the river ice ... He felt
choked and stopped to breathe. Should he go back? It was horrible to
turn. It was like admitting that the man was not to be found--that this
was the end.

"Colonel!"

He said to himself that he would go back, and build a fire for a
signal, and return; but he ran on farther and farther away from the
sled and from the forest. Was it growing faintly light? He looked up.
Oh, yes; presently it would be brighter still. Those streamers of pale
light dancing in the North; they would be green and scarlet and orange
and purple, and the terrible white world would be illumined as by
conflagration. He stopped again. That the Colonel should have dropped
so far back as this, and the man in front not know--it was incredible.
What was that? A shadow on the ice. A frozen hummock? No, a man. Was it
really....? Glory hallelujah--it _was!_ But the shadow lay there
ghastly still and the Boy's greeting died in his throat. He had fo