n-fag. And he felt better. His
brain was clearer. He listened to the watch and found its ticking
natural. He braced himself to another effort and whistled as he
prepared his breakfast.

After that he packed his dunnage and continued south. He wondered if
Conniston ever knew his Manual as he learned it now. At the end of the
sixth day he could repeat it from cover to cover. Every hour he made it
a practice to stop short and salute the trees about him. McDowell would
not catch him there.

"I am Derwent Conniston," he kept telling himself. "John Keith is
dead--dead. I buried him back there under the cabin, the cabin built by
Sergeant Trossy and his patrol in nineteen hundred and eight. My name
is Conniston--Derwent Conniston."

In his years of aloneness he had grown into the habit of talking to
himself--or with himself--to keep up his courage and sanity. "Keith,
old boy, we've got to fight it out," he would say. Now it was,
"Conniston, old chap, we'll win or die." After the third day, he never
spoke of John Keith except as a man who was dead. And over the dead
John Keith he spread Conniston's mantle. "John Keith died game, sir,"
he said to McDowell, who was a tree. "He was the finest chap I ever
knew."

On this sixth day came the miracle. For the first time in many months
John Keith saw the sun. He had seen the murky glow of it before this,
fighting to break through the pall of fog and haze that hung over the
Barrens, but this sixth day it was the sun, the real sun, bursting in
all its glory for a short space over the northern world. Each day after
this the sun was nearer and warmer, as the arctic vapor clouds and
frost smoke were left farther behind, and not until he had passed
beyond the ice fogs entirely did Keith swing westward. He did not
hurry, for now that he was out of his prison, he wanted time in which
to feel the first exhilarating thrill of his freedom. And more than all
else he knew that he must measure and test himself for the tremendous
fight ahead of him.

Now that the sun and the blue sky had cleared his brain, he saw the
hundred pit-falls in his way, the hundred little slips that might be
made, the hundred traps waiting for any chance blunder on his part.
Deliberately he was on his way to the hangman. Down there--every day of
his life--he would rub elbows with him as he passed his fellow men in
the street. He would never completely feel himself out of the presence
of death. Day and night he must wa