“They say the Mission door was locked and barred, but I pushed through it like paper and came into Father Barnum’s house, where they sat.  Fifty below is bad for the naked flesh.  I broke in, bare-headed, mittenless, and I’d froze some on the way down.  He saw murder in my eyes and tried to run, but I got him as he went out of the room.  He tore his throat loose from my stiffened fingers and went into the church, but I beat down the door with my naked fists, mocking at his prayers inside, and may I never be closer to death than Orloff was that night.

“Then a squaw tugged at my parka.

“‘She is dying, Anguk,’ she said, and I ran back up the hill with the cold bitin’ at my heart.

“There was no death that night in Holy Cross, though God knows one naked soul was due to walk out onto the snow.  At daylight, when I came back for him, he had fled down the river with the fastest dogs, and to this day I’ve never seen his face, though ’tis often I’ve felt his hate.

“He’s grown into the strongest missionary on the coast, and he never lets a chance go by to harry me or the girl.

“D’ye mind the time ‘Skagway’ Bennet died?  We was pardners up Norton Sound way when he was killed.  They thought he suicided, but I know.  I found a cariboo belt in the brush near camp—­the kind they make on the Kuskokwim, Father Orion’s country.  His men took the wrong one, that’s all.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell ye this, Cap, before we started, for now we’re into the South Country, where he owns the natives.  He knows we’ve come, as the blood-token of the guide showed.  He wants my life, and there’s great trouble comin’ up.  I’m hopin’ ye’ll soon get your sight, for by now there’s a runner twenty miles into the hills with news that we’re blind in the church at Togiak.  Three days he’ll be goin’, and on the fifth ye’ll hear the jangle of Russian dog-bells.  He’ll kill the fastest team in Nushagak in the comin’, and God help us if we’re here.”

George scraped a bit of frost-lace from the lone window pane.  Dark figures moved over the snow, circling the chapel, and he knew that each was armed.  Only their reverence for the church held them from doing the task set by Orloff, and he sighed as he changed the bandages on his suffering mate.

They awoke the next morning to the moan of wind and the sift of snow clouds past their walls.  Staring through his peep-hole, George distinguished only a seethe of whirling flakes that greyed the view, blotting even the neighbouring huts, and when the early evening brought a rising note in the storm the trouble lifted from his face.

“A three-day blizzard,” he rejoiced, “and the strongest team on the coast can’t wallow through it under a week.  These on-shore gales is beauts.”

For three days the wind tore from off the sea into the open bight at whose head lay Togiak, and its violence wrecked the armour of shore ice in the bay till it beat and roared against the spit, a threshing maelstrom of shattered bergs.  The waters piled into the inlet driven by the lash of the storm till they overflowed the river ice behind the village, submerging and breaking it into ragged, dangerous confusion.