isk my
life, was the act of a man who was very brave." And next he said, "I
wonder what were his last words when he crashed through the ice? I
expect he said, 'Damn.' Well, that was as good as any other word to
say; after all, all swearing, taken in a certain sense, is a form of
prayer--a bluff assertion of belief in the divine."

Granger turned slowly about, and commenced to make his way back to the
Point. At first he spoke aloud to himself as a thought occurred. "I
distrusted that yellow beast of Spurling's from the first." "Now at
any rate Spurling is safe." "I haven't yet discovered whether Mordaunt
is dead,"--and so on. Then he ceased to speak with his lips, and his
thoughts were uttered in the silence of his brain. They had all to do
with Strangeways.

He wondered what vision had been his, causing him to smile as he sank.
Did he think of that girl, and that he was going to meet her? Or of
the old home in England? Or of his school-days? Or was it the Thames
he thought about--of Oxford with its many towers, and the cry of the
coach along the tow-path as the eight swings homeward up-stream, in
the grey of a winter afternoon, to the regular click of the rowlocks
as the men pluck their blades from the water, feather and come forward
for the next stroke, making ready to drive back their slides as one
man with their legs? He was certain that whatever happened, and
however he should go out of life, did God spare him a moment's
consciousness, it would be the vision of Oxford with its domes and
spires, its austere and romantic quiet, its echoing cloisters and
passages, its rivers with their sedges of silver and of grey, which
would float before his dying eyes,--or would he think of Christ? Had
Christ been the vision which this man had seen?

Strange thoughts for Keewatin! But death is always strange.

CHAPTER IX

THE BREAK-UP OF THE ICE

Nearly a month had gone by since the night on which Strangeways died.
Not that time mattered much to Granger, for, like the immortals, men
in Keewatin have dispensed with time: they have accepted as true the
lesson which philosophers have been striving to teach the world ever
since the human intellect first commenced to philosophise--that there
are no such ontological facts as Time and Space. Among the men of this
vast northern territory the outward expression of religion is rare;
they do not often speak, and then only of such interests as are
superficial to their lives. Yet