drawn a wolfskin, the gleaming teeth and cruel snout
surmounting his head. No other word was spoken. The prospectors held
the peace. Sipsu arose and slipped into her snowshoes.

"Good-by, O my man," she said to Hitchcock. But the man who had sat
beside her on the sled gave no sign, nor lifted his head as they filed
away into the white forest.

Unlike many men, his faculty of adaptation, while large, had never
suggested the expediency of an alliance with the women of the Northland.
His broad cosmopolitanism had never impelled toward covenanting in
marriage with the daughters of the soil. If it had, his philosophy of
life would not have stood between. But it simply had not. Sipsu? He
had pleasured in camp-fire chats with her, not as a man who knew himself
to be man and she woman, but as a man might with a child, and as a man of
his make certainly would if for no other reason than to vary the tedium
of a bleak existence. That was all. But there was a certain chivalric
thrill of warm blood in him, despite his Yankee ancestry and New England
upbringing, and he was so made that the commercial aspect of life often
seemed meaningless and bore contradiction to his deeper impulses.

So he sat silent, with head bowed forward, an organic force, greater than
himself, as great as his race, at work within him. Wertz and Hawes
looked askance at him from time to time, a faint but perceptible
trepidation in their manner. Sigmund also felt this. Hitchcock was
strong, and his strength had been impressed upon them in the course of
many an event in their precarious life. So they stood in a certain
definite awe and curiosity as to what his conduct would be when he moved
to action.

But his silence was long, and the fire nigh out, when Wertz stretched his
arms and yawned, and thought he'd go to bed. Then Hitchcock stood up his
full height.

"May God damn your souls to the deepest hells, you chicken-hearted
cowards! I'm done with you!" He said it calmly enough, but his strength
spoke in every syllable, and every intonation was advertisement of
intention. "Come on," he continued, "whack up, and in whatever way suits
you best. I own a quarter-interest in the claims; our contracts show
that. There're twenty-five or thirty ounces in the sack from the test
pans. Fetch out the scales. We'll divide that now. And you, Sigmund,
measure me my quarter-share of the grub and set it apart. Four of the
dogs are mine, and I want fo