“What’s wrong?”

The Colonel smiled a queer little one-sided smile.  “I’ve been out o’ kelter nearly ten years.”

“Oh, that’s all right.  You’ll go on for another thirty if you stay where you are till the ice goes out.”

The Colonel bent his head, and stared at the smooth-trodden floor at the edge of the buffalo-skin.  “To tell the truth, I’ll be glad to go, not only because of—­” He hitched his shoulders towards the corner whence came the hoarse and muffled breathing of the Denver clerk.  “I’ll be glad to have something to tire me out, so I’ll sleep—­sleep too sound to dream.  That’s what I came for, not to sit idle in a God-damn cabin and think—­think—­” He got up suddenly and strode the tiny space from fire to door, a man transformed, with hands clenching and dark face almost evil.  “They say the men who winter up here either take to drink or go mad.  I begin to see it is so.  It’s no place to do any forgetting in.”  He stopped suddenly before the Boy with glittering eyes.  “It’s the country where your conscience finds you out.”

“That religion of yours is makin’ you morbid, Colonel.”  The Boy spoke with the detached and soothing air of a sage.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  He turned sharply away.  The Boy relapsed into silence.  The Colonel in his renewed prowling brought up against the wooden crane.  He stood looking down into the fire.  Loud and regular sounded the sleeping man’s breathing in the quiet little room.

“I did a wrong once to a woman—­ten years ago,” said the Colonel, speaking to the back-log—­“although I loved her.”  He raised a hand to his eyes with a queer choking sound.  “I loved her,” he repeated, still with his back to the Boy.  “By-and-by I could have righted it, but she—­she wasn’t the kind to hang about and wait on a man’s better nature when once he’d shown himself a coward.  She skipped the country.”  He leaned his head against the end of the shelf over the fire, and said no more.

“Go back in the spring, find out where she is, and—­”

“I’ve spent every spring and every summer, every fall and every winter till this one, trying to do just that thing.”

“You can’t find her?”

“Nobody can find her.”

“She’s dead—­”

“She’s not dead!”

The Boy involuntarily shrank back; the Colonel looked ready to smash him.  The action recalled the older man to himself.

“I feel sure she isn’t dead,” he said more quietly, but still trembling.  “No, no; she isn’t dead.  She had some money of her own, and she went abroad.  I followed her.  I heard of her in Paris, in Rome.  I saw her once in a droschky in Vienna; there I lost the trail.  Her people said she’d gone to Japan. I went to Japan.  I’m sure she wasn’t in the islands.  I’ve spent my life since trying to find her—­writing her letters that always come back—­trying—­” His voice went out like a candle-wick suddenly dying