e, he realized that it
must be night. For a light was burning ahead of him, and all else was
gloom. His first thought was that it was a campfire, miles and miles away.
Then it drew nearer--until he knew that it was a light in a cabin window.
He dragged himself toward it, and when he came to the door he tried to
shout. But no sound fell from his swollen lips. It seemed an hour before he
could twist his feet out of his snowshoes. Then he groped for a latch,
pressed against the door, and plunged in.

What he saw was like a picture suddenly revealed for an instant by a
flashlight. In the cabin there were four men. Two sat at a table, directly
in front of him. One held a dice box poised in the air, and had turned a
rough, bearded face toward him. The other was a younger man, and in this
moment of lapsing consciousness it struck Roscoe as strange that he should
be clutching a can of beans between his hands. A third man stared from
where he had been looking down upon the dice-play of the other two. As
Roscoe came in he was in the act of lowering a half-filled bottle from his
lips. The fourth man sat on the edge of a bunk, with a face so white and
thin that he might have been taken for a corpse if it had not been for a
dark glare in his sunken eyes. Roscoe smelled the odor of whisky; he
smelled food. He saw no sign of welcome in the faces turned toward him,
but he advanced upon them, mumbling incoherently. And then the spark--the
fighting spark in him--gave out, and he crumpled down on the floor. He
heard a voice, which came to him--as if from a great distance, and which
said, "Who the h--l is this?" And then, after what seemed to be a long
time, he heard another voice say, "Pitch him back into the snow."

After that he lost consciousness.

* * * * *

A long time before he awoke he knew that he was not in the snow, and that
hot stuff was running down his throat. When he opened his eyes there was no
longer a light burning in the cabin. It was day. He felt strangely
comfortable, but there was something in the cabin that stirred him from his
rest. It was the odour of frying bacon. He raised himself upon his elbow,
prepared to thank his deliverers, and to eat. All of his hunger had come
back. The joy of life, of anticipation, shone in his thin face as he pulled
himself up. Another face--the bearded face--red-eyed, almost animal-like in
its fierce questioning, bent over him.

"Where's your grub, pa