He struck a jutting rock, only half snowed under, that broke the sheer face of the promontory, and he bounded once like a rubber ball, struck a second time, caught desperately at a solitary clump of ice-sheathed alders, crashed through the snow-crust just below them, and was held there like a mudlark in its cliff nest, halfway between bluff and river.

His last clear thought had been an intense anxiety about his snow-shoes as they sailed away, two liberated kites, but as he went on falling, clutching at the air—­falling—­and felt the alder twigs snap under his hands, he said to himself, “This is death,” but calmly, as if it were a small matter compared to losing one’s snow-shoes.

It was only when he landed in the snow, that he was conscious of any of the supposed natural excitement of a man meeting a violent end.  It was then, before he even got his breath back, that he began to struggle frantically to get a foothold; but he only broke down more of the thin ice-wall that kept him from the sheer drop to the river, sixty or seventy feet below.  He lay quite still.  Would the Colonel come after him?  If he did come, would he risk his life to——­If he did risk his life, was it any use to try to——­He craned his neck and looked up, blinked, shut his eyes, and lay back in the snow with a sound of far-off singing in his head.  “Any use?” No, sir; it just about wasn’t.  That bluff face would be easier to climb up than to climb down, and either was impossible.

Then it was, that a great tide of longing swept over him—­a flood of passionate desire for more of this doubtful blessing, life.  All the bitter hardship—­why, how sweet it was, after all, to battle and to overcome!  It was only this lying helpless, trapped, that was evil.  The endless Trail?  Why, it was only the coming to the end that a man minded.

Suddenly the beauty that for days had been veiled shone out.  Nothing in all the earth was glorious with the glory of the terrible white North.  And he had only just been wakened to it.  Here, now, lying in his grave, had come this special revelation of the rapture of living, and the splendour of the visible universe.

The sky over his head—­he had called it “a mean outlook,” and turned away.  It was the same sky that bent over him now with a tenderness that made him lift his cramped arms with tears, as a sick child might to its mother.  The haloed sun with his attendant dogs—­how little the wonder had touched him!  Never had he seen them so dim and sad as to-night ... saying good-bye to one who loved the sun.

The great frozen road out of sight below, road that came winding, winding down out of the Arctic Circle—­what other highway so majestic, mysterious?—­shining and beckoning on.  An earthly Milky Way, leading to the golden paradise he had been travelling towards since summer.

And he was to go no further?—­not till the June rains and thaws and winds and floods should carry him back, as he had foreseen, far below there at Holy Cross.