The ice-locked winter would be broken; the winds would blow and the forests answer; the land would bathe in the blessed sunshine, and life renew.

Hand in hand, they would quit this horrid dream and journey back to the Southland.  They lurched blindly forward, and their hands met—­their poor maimed hands, swollen and distorted beneath their mittens.

But the promise was destined to remain unfulfilled.  The Northland is the Northland, and men work out their souls by strange rules, which other men, who have not journeyed into far countries, cannot come to understand.

An hour later, Cuthfert put a pan of bread into the oven, and fell to speculating on what the surgeons could do with his feet when he got back.  Home did not seem so very far away now.  Weatherbee was rummaging in the cache.  Of a sudden, he raised a whirlwind of blasphemy, which in turn ceased with startling abruptness.  The other man had robbed his sugar-sack.  Still, things might have happened differently, had not the two dead men come out from under the stones and hushed the hot words in his throat.  They led him quite gently from the cache, which he forgot to close.  That consummation was reached; that something they had whispered to him in his dreams was about to happen.  They guided him gently, very gently, to the woodpile, where they put the axe in his hands.

Then they helped him shove open the cabin door, and he felt sure they shut it after him—­at least he heard it slam and the latch fall sharply into place.  And he knew they were waiting just without, waiting for him to do his task.

‘Carter!  I say, Carter!’ Percy Cuthfert was frightened at the look on the clerk’s face, and he made haste to put the table between them.

Carter Weatherbee followed, without haste and without enthusiasm.  There was neither pity nor passion in his face, but rather the patient, stolid look of one who has certain work to do and goes about it methodically.

‘I say, what’s the matter?’

The clerk dodged back, cutting off his retreat to the door, but never opening his mouth.

‘I say, Carter, I say; let’s talk.  There’s a good chap.’  The master of arts was thinking rapidly, now, shaping a skillful flank movement on the bed where his Smith & Wesson lay.  Keeping his eyes on the madman, he rolled backward on the bunk, at the same time clutching the pistol.

‘Carter!’ The powder flashed full in Weatherbee’s face, but he swung his weapon and leaped forward.  The axe bit deeply at the base of the spine, and Percy Cuthfert felt all consciousness of his lower limbs leave him.  Then the clerk fell heavily upon him, clutching him by the throat with feeble fingers.  The sharp bite of the axe had caused Cuthfert to drop the pistol, and as his lungs panted for release, he fumbled aimlessly for it among the blankets.  Then he remembered.  He slid a hand up the clerk’s belt to the sheath-knife; and they drew very close to each other in that last clinch.