The austerity of the country was well-nigh overwhelming.  The nakedness of it all suggested a skeleton world robbed of everything that could make existence possible.  It suggested a world that was sick, and aged, and too unfruitful to harbour aught but the fierce elemental storms of the northern winter.  And the cold of it ate into the bones of the lonely figure passing through the great silence like a ghost.

* * * * *

The night was deathly still.  A thermometer would have registered something colder than sixty degrees below zero.  Not a breath of wind stirred.  The only sound that came was the doleful note of a prowling wolf in the forest belt near by, and the booming protest of the trees against the bitterness of winter.

The sky was ablaze with a myriad jewels in a velvet setting.  And a cold wealth of aurora lit the northern heavens.  Camp had been pitched well wide of the nearby forests, and three men sat crouching over the fire.  There was little enough to differentiate between them.  They were white men, and all were clad, from their heads to the soles of their seal hide moccasins, in heavy furs.  The dark outlines of two sleds showed up a few yards away, but the dogs, themselves, were not visible.  Weary with their day’s run they had betaken themselves to their nightly snow burrows to dream over past battles, past labours.

The men were talking earnestly in the low, slow tones which the silence of the forests seems to inspire.  Three pairs of bare hands were outheld to the welcome blaze of the fire.  Three pairs of clear gazing eyes searched the heart of it.  None were smoking.  It would have been a burden to keep the pipe stem from freezing even in the vicinity of the fire, and none of them were in any mood to accept any added burden.

A blue-eyed, beardless youth shifted his gaze to the dark face directly opposite him beyond the fire.

“Oh, we got that guy—­good,” he said.  There was laughter in his eyes but not in his tone.  “We got him plumb at the game.  He was chock full of kerosene and tinder, and he’d fired the patch in several places.  We were on it quick.  We beat the fire in seconds.  As for him, why, I guess his Ma’s going to forget him right away.  Leastways I hope so.  He went out like the snuff of a lucifer, and his body’s likely handed plenty feed to any wolf straying around.”

The dark man across the fire nodded.

“Did he hand a squeal before—­he went?”

“Not a word.  Hadn’t time.  Peter here didn’t ast a thing either.”

The youth laughed softly, and the man called Peter took up the story.

“Tain’t no use arguin’ with a feller loaded with kerosene in these forests,” he said, in a low grumbling way.  Then he reached down and snatched a brand from the fire and flung it out on the snow.  His action was followed swiftly by a wolfish howl of dismay.  Then he again turned his grizzled, whiskered face to the dark man beyond the fire.  “You see, Father, it’s our job keeping these forests from fire, an’ it ain’t easy.  It don’t much concern us who’s out to fire ’em.  That’s for other folks.  The feller with kerosene in these forests is goin’ to get the stuff we ken hand him.  That’s all.  Bob an’ me got our own way fer actin’.”