hilosophy and viewpoint of his own, both of which he kept unto himself
without effort to impress them on other people. He believed that life
itself was the cheapest thing on the face of all the earth. All other
things had their limitations.

There was so much water and so much land, so many mountains and so many
plains, so many square feet to live on and so many square feet to be
buried in. All things could be measured, and stood up, and
catalogued--except life itself. "Given time," he would say, "a single
pair of humans can populate all creation." Therefore, being the
cheapest of all things, it was true philosophy that life should be the
easiest of all things to give up when the necessity came.

Which is only another way of emphasizing that Kent was not, and never
had been, afraid to die. But it does not say that he treasured life a
whit less than the man in another room, who, a day or so before, had
fought like a lunatic before going under an anesthetic for the
amputation of a bad finger. No man had loved life more than he. No man
had lived nearer it.

It had been a passion with him. Full of dreams, and always with
anticipations ahead, no matter how far short realizations fell, he was
an optimist, a lover of the sun and the moon and the stars, a worshiper
of the forests and of the mountains, a man who loved his life, and who
had fought for it, and yet who was ready--at the last--to yield it up
without a whimper when the fates asked for it.

Bolstered up against his pillows, he did not look the part of the fiend
he was confessing himself to be to the people about him. Sickness had
not emaciated him. The bronze of his lean, clean-cut face had faded a
little, but the tanning of wind and sun and campfire was still there.
His blue eyes were perhaps dulled somewhat by the nearness of death.
One would not have judged him to be thirty-six, even though over one
temple there was a streak of gray in his blond hair--a heritage from
his mother, who was dead. Looking at him, as his lips quietly and
calmly confessed himself beyond the pale of men's sympathy or
forgiveness, one would have said that his crime was impossible.

Through his window, as he sat bolstered up in his cot, Kent could see
the slow-moving shimmer of the great Athabasca River as it moved on its
way toward the Arctic Ocean. The sun was shining, and he saw the cool,
thick masses of the spruce and cedar forests beyond, the rising
undulations of wilderness ridges