d, "and has had nothing to do
since Will's been gone."

Katrine shut the stove up, and the two women went out together.

It was a still dead cold without, the sort of night on which your limbs
might freeze beyond recovery, and without your knowing it, so insidious
and so little aggressive was the cold.

"You go in and keep warm," said Katrine; "I'll find the pony and manage
him," and she pushed Annie gently within her own door, and went round to
the shed at the back of the cabin where the pony was. Her hands in that
short time had grown so stiff with cold she could hardly put the saddle
on and fasten the girth and straps. The pony knew her, and pricked his
ears and snorted while she was getting him ready; he had been idle in
his stable two days, and by this time was willing to welcome any change
in the monotony of life. When she had adjusted everything carefully by
the light of the strong moon falling through the little window, she
threw herself cross leg upon his back and rode him out of the shed.
Annie had her face pressed eagerly against the back window of her cabin,
watching for her to appear. Katrine smiled at her, lifted her fur cap
above her head for an instant as a man would do, and then the next
moment was cantering away over the snowy waste that stretched behind
Good Luck Row. She went at a good pace, urged on by that last glimpse of
the pale face, with the terrible look of haunted fear on it, pressed to
the window.

The temperature was very low, but the absence of wind and dampness in
the air made the cold bearable. Katrine, haunted by the fear of
frostbite, kept pinching her nose and pulling her ears and banging her
feet against the pony's side to keep the blood stirring in them. Inside
the first half-hour she was away some distance from the lights of
Dawson, and nothing but great snowy stretches lay around her.

That night up at the west gulch it happened that neither Stephen nor
Talbot had gone to bed. There is little to choose between night and day
there, since half of the day hours are dark as the blackest night, and a
man can sleep in them as profitably or more so than in the moonlit hours
of the night. Three o'clock in the morning had come, and the two men
were still sitting talking on each side of the stove, with an opened
whisky bottle on the table between them, in Stephen's cabin, when the
dull sound of a horse's footfall broke the blank silence of the gulch.
Both sprang to their feet on the in