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Page 5
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 to die.
Conniston would never know how near the final breakdown his brain had
been in that hour when he made him a prisoner. And Keith had not told
him. The man-hunter had saved him from going mad. But Keith had kept
that secret to himself.
Even now he shrank down as a blast of wind shot out of the chaos above
and smote the cabin with a shriek that had in it a peculiarly
penetrating note. And then he squared his shoulders and laughed, and
the yapping of the foxes no longer filled him with a shuddering
torment. Beyond them he was seeing home. God's country! Green forests
and waters spattered with golden sun--things he had almost forgotten;
once more the faces of women who were white. And with those faces he
heard the voice of his people and the song of birds and felt under his
feet the velvety touch of earth that was bathed in the aroma of
flowers. Yes, he had almost forgotten those things. Yesterday they had
been with him only as moldering skeletons--phantasmal
dream-things--because he was going mad, but now they were real, they
were just off there to the south, and he was going to them. He
stretched up his arms, and a cry rose out of his throat. It was of
triumph, of final exaltation. Three years of THAT--and he had lived
through it! Three years of dodging from burrow to burrow, just as
Conniston had said, like a hunted fox; three years of starvation, of
freezing, of loneliness so great that his soul had broken--and now he
was going home!
He turned again to the cabin, and when he entered the pale face of the
dying Englishman greeted him from the dim glow of the yellow light at
the table. And Conniston was smiling in a quizzical, distressed sort of
way, with a hand at his chest. His open watch on the table pointed to
the hour of midnight when the lesson went on.
Still later he heated the muzzle of his revolver in the flame of the
seal-oil.
"It will hurt, old chap--putting this scar over your eye. But it's got
to be done. I say, won't it be a ripping joke on McDowell?" Softly he
repeated it, smiling into Keith's eyes. "A ripping joke--on McDowell!"
III
Dawn--the dusk of another night--and Keith raised his haggard face from
Conniston's bedside with a woman's sob on his lips. The Englishman had
died as he knew that he would die, game to the last threadbare breath
that came out of his body. For with this last breath he whispered the
words which he had repeated a dozen times before, "Remember, old chap,
you win or lose the moment McDowell first sets his eyes on you!" And
then, with a strange kind of sob in his chest, he was gone, and Keith's
eyes were blinded by the miracle of a hot flood of tears, and there
rose in him a mighty pride in the name of Derwent Conniston.
It was his name now. John Keith was dead. It was Derwent Conniston who
was living. And as he looked down into the cold, still face of the
heroic Englishman, the thing did not seem so strange to him after all.
It would not be difficult to bear Conniston's name; the difficulty
would be in living up to the Conniston code.
That night the rumble of the ice fields was clearer because there was
no wind to deaden their tumult. The sky was cloudless, and the stars
were like glaring, yellow eyes peering through holes in a vast,
overhanging curtain of jet black. Keith, out to fill his lungs with
air, looked up at the phenomenon of the polar night and shuddered. The
stars were like living things, and they were looking at him. Under
their sinister glow the foxes were holding high carnival. It seemed to
Keith that they had drawn a closer circle about the cabin and that
there was a different note in their yapping now, a note that was more
persistent, more horrible. Conniston had foreseen that closing-in of
the little white beasts of the night, and Keith, reentering the cabin,
set about the fulfillment of his promise. Ghostly dawn found his task
completed.
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