ling his own agony, was magnificent. And
Keith felt his warped and despairing soul swelling with a new life and
a new hope, and he was thrilled by the thought of what he must do to
live up to the mark of the Englishman. Conniston's story was of the
important things first. It began with his acquaintance with McDowell.
And then, between the paroxysms that stained his lips red, he filled in
with incident and smiled wanly as he told how McDowell had sworn him to
secrecy once in the matter of an incident which the chief did not want
the barracks to know--and laugh over. A very sensitive man in some ways
was McDowell! At the end of the first hour Keith stood up in the middle
of the floor, and with his arms resting on the table and his shoulders
sagging Conniston put him through the drill. After that he gave Keith
his worn Service Manual and commanded him to study while he rested.
Keith helped him to his bunk, and for a time after that tried to read
the Service book. But his eyes blurred, and his brain refused to obey.
The agony in the Englishman's low breathing oppressed him with a
physical pain. Keith felt himself choking and rose at last from the
table and went out into the gray, ghostly twilight of the night.

His lungs drank in the ice-tanged air. But it was not cold.
Kwaske-hoo--the change--had come. The air was filled with the tumult of
the last fight of winter against the invasion of spring, and the forces
of winter were crumbling. The earth under Keith's feet trembled in the
mighty throes of their dissolution. He could hear more clearly the roar
and snarl and rending thunder of the great fields of ice as they swept
down with the arctic current into Hudson's Bay. Over him hovered a
strange night. It was not black but a weird and wraith-like gray, and
out of this sepulchral chaos came strange sounds and the moaning of a
wind high up. A little while longer, Keith thought, and the thing would
have driven him mad. Even now he fancied he heard the screaming and
wailing of voices far up under the hidden stars. More than once in the
past months he had listened to the sobbing of little children, the
agony of weeping women, and the taunting of wind voices that were
either tormenting or crying out in a ghoulish triumph; and more than
once in those months he had seen Eskimos--born in that hell but driven
mad in the torture of its long night--rend the clothes from their
bodies and plunge naked out into the pitiless gloom and cold t