“The little cuss!” said Falkner.  “He’s sure got his nerve!”

He went on eating his beans, and when he had done he lighted a lamp, for the half Arctic darkness was falling early, and began to clear away the dishes.  When he had done he put a scrap of bannock and a few beans on the corner of the table.

“I’ll bet he’s hungry, the little cuss,” he said.  “A thousand miles—­in that box!”

He sat down close to the sheet-iron box stove, which was glowing red-hot, and filled his pipe.  Kerosene was a precious commodity, and he had turned down the lamp wick until he was mostly in gloom.  Outside a storm was wailing down across the Barrens from the North.  He could hear the swish of the spruce-boughs overhead, and those moaning, half-shrieking sounds that always came with storm from out of the North, and sometimes fooled even him into thinking they were human cries.  They had seemed more and more human to him during the past three days, and he was growing afraid.  Once or twice strange thoughts had come into his head, and he had tried to fight them down.  He had known of men whom loneliness had driven mad—­and he was terribly lonely.  He shivered as a piercing blast of wind filled with a mourning wail swept over the cabin.

And that day, too, he had been taken with a touch of fever.  It burned more hotly in his blood to-night, and he knew that it was the loneliness—­the emptiness of the world about him, the despair and black foreboding that came to him with the first early twilights of the Long Night.  For he was in the edge of that Long Night.  For weeks he would only now and then catch a glimpse of the sun.  He shuddered.

A hundred and fifty miles to the south and east there was a Hudson’s Bay post.  Eighty miles south was the nearest trapper’s cabin he knew of.  Two months before he had gone down to the post, with a thick beard to cover his face, and had brought back supplies—­and the box.  His wife had sent up the box to him, only it had come to him as “John Blake” instead of Jim Falkner, his right name.  There were things in it for him to wear, and pictures of the sweet-faced wife who was still filled with prayer and hope for him, and of the kid, their boy.  “He is walking now,” she had written to him, “and a dozen times a day he goes to your picture and says ’Pa-pa—­Pa-pa’—­and every night we talk about you before we go to bed, and pray God to send you back to us soon.”

“God bless ’em!” breathed Jim.

He had not lighted his pipe, and there was something in his eyes that shimmered and glistened in the dull light.  And then, as he sat silent, his eyes clearing, he saw that the little mouse had climbed back to the edge of the table.  It did not eat the food he had placed there for it, but humped itself up in a tiny ball again, and its tiny shining eyes looked in his direction.

“You’re not hungry,” said Jim, and he spoke aloud.  “You’re lonely, too—­that’s it!”