spark commanded Roscoe to die upon his feet, if he died at all.  It was this spark which brought him at last to a bit of timber thick enough to give him shelter from wind and snow.  It burned a little more warmly then.  It flared up, and gave him new vision.  And, for the first time, he realized that it must be night.  For a light was burning ahead of him, and all else was gloom.  His first thought was that it was a campfire, miles and miles away.  Then it drew nearer—­until he knew that it was a light in a cabin window.  He dragged himself toward it, and when he came to the door he tried to shout.  But no sound fell from his swollen lips.  It seemed an hour before he could twist his feet out of his snowshoes.  Then he groped for a latch, pressed against the door, and plunged in.

What he saw was like a picture suddenly revealed for an instant by a flashlight.  In the cabin there were four men.  Two sat at a table, directly in front of him.  One held a dice box poised in the air, and had turned a rough, bearded face toward him.  The other was a younger man, and in this moment of lapsing consciousness it struck Roscoe as strange that he should be clutching a can of beans between his hands.  A third man stared from where he had been looking down upon the dice-play of the other two.  As Roscoe came in he was in the act of lowering a half-filled bottle from his lips.  The fourth man sat on the edge of a bunk, with a face so white and thin that he might have been taken for a corpse if it had not been for a dark glare in his sunken eyes.  Roscoe smelled the odor of whisky; he smelled food.  He saw no sign of welcome in the faces turned toward him, but he advanced upon them, mumbling incoherently.  And then the spark—­the fighting spark in him—­gave out, and he crumpled down on the floor.  He heard a voice, which came to him—­as if from a great distance, and which said, “Who the h—­l is this?” And then, after what seemed to be a long time, he heard another voice say, “Pitch him back into the snow.”

After that he lost consciousness.

* * * * *

A long time before he awoke he knew that he was not in the snow, and that hot stuff was running down his throat.  When he opened his eyes there was no longer a light burning in the cabin.  It was day.  He felt strangely comfortable, but there was something in the cabin that stirred him from his rest.  It was the odour of frying bacon.  He raised himself upon his elbow, prepared to thank his deliverers, and to eat.  All of his hunger had come back.  The joy of life, of anticipation, shone in his thin face as he pulled himself up.  Another face—­the bearded face—­red-eyed, almost animal-like in its fierce questioning, bent over him.

“Where’s your grub, pardner?”

The question was like a stab.  Roscoe did not hear his own voice as he explained.

“Got none!” The bearded man’s voice was like a bellow as he turned upon the others.