with surface
lights. He had cost much: he was to be given no chance to escape.
Always his hands remained bound with the buckskin thongs, except at
times when Dick or Sam stood over him with a rifle. At night his wrists
were further attached to one of Sam's. Mack, too, understood the
situation, and guarded as jealously as did his masters.

Sam wielded the steersman's paddle. His appearance was absolutely
unaffected by this one episode in a long life.

They rounded the point into the main sweep of the east river, stole down
along the bank in the gathering twilight, and softly beached their canoe
below the white buildings of the Factory. With a muttered word of
command to their captive, they disembarked and climbed the steepness of
the low bluff to the grass-plot above. The dog followed at their heels.

Suddenly the impression of this year, until now so vividly a part of the
present, was stricken into the past, the past of memory. Up to the very
instant of topping the bluff it had been life; now it was experience.

For the Post was absolutely unchanged from that other summer evening of
over a year ago when they had started out into the Silent Places. The
familiarity of this fact, hitherto, for some strange reason, absolutely
unexpected, reassured them their places in the normal world of living
beings. The dead vision of the North had left in their spirits a
residuum of its mysticism. Their experience of her power had induced in
them a condition of mind when it would not have surprised them to
discover the world shaken to its foundations, as their souls had been
shaken. But here were familiar, peaceful things, unchanged, indifferent
even to the passing of time. Involuntarily they drew a deep breath of
relief, and, without knowing it, re-entered a sanity which had not been
entirely theirs since the snows of the autumn before.

Over by the guns, indistinct in the falling twilight, the accustomed
group of _voyageurs_ and post-keepers were chatting, smoking, humming
songs in the accustomed way. The low velvet band of forest against the
sky; the dim squares of the log-houses punctuated with their dots of
lamplight; the masses of the Storehouse, the stockade, the Factory; the
long flag-staff like a mast against the stars; the constant impression
of human life and activity,--these anodynes of accustomedness steadied
these men's faith to the supremacy of human institutions.

On the Factory veranda could be dimly made out the