He placed a pan of snow-water on the stove and began making his simple preparations for breakfast.  For the first time in many days he felt actually hungry.  And then all at once he stopped, and a low cry that was half joy and half wonder broke from his lips.  With tensely gripped hands and eyes that shone with a strange light he stared straight at the blank surface of the log wall—­through it—­and a thousand miles away.  He remembered that day—­years ago—­the scenes of which came to him now as though they had been but yesterday.  It was afternoon, in the glorious summer, and he had gone to Hester’s home.  Only the day before Hester had promised to be his wife, and he remembered how fidgety and uneasy and yet wondrously happy he was as he sat out on the big white veranda, waiting for her to put on her pink muslin dress, which went go well with the gold of her hair and the blue of her eyes.  And as he sat there, Hester’s maltese pet came up the steps, bringing in its jaws a tiny, quivering brown mouse.  It was playing with the almost lifeless little creature when Hester came through the door.

He heard again the low cry that came from her lips then.  In an instant she had snatched the tiny, limp thing from between the cat’s paws, and had faced him.  He was laughing at her, but the glow in her blue eyes sobered him.  “I didn’t think you—­would take pleasure in that, Jim,” she said.  “It’s only a mouse, but it’s alive, and I can feel its poor little heart beating!”

They had saved it, and he, a little ashamed at the smallness of the act, had gone with Hester to the barn and made a nest for it in the hay.  But the wonderful words that he remembered were these:  “Perhaps some day a little mouse will help you, Jim!” Hester had spoken laughingly.  And her words had come true!

All the time that Falkner was preparing and eating his breakfast he watched for the mouse, but it did not appear.  Then he went to the door.  It swung outward, and it took all his weight to force it open.  On one side of the cabin the snow was drifted almost to the roof.  Ahead of him he could barely make out the dark shadow of the scrub spruce forest beyond the little clearing he had made.  He could hear the spruce-tops wailing and twisting in the storm, and the snow and wind stung his face, and half blinded him.

It was dark—­dark with that gray and maddening gloom that yesterday would have driven him still nearer to the merge of madness.  But this morning he laughed as he listened to the wailings in the air and stared out into the ghostly chaos.  It was not the thought of his loneliness that come to him now, but the thought that he was safe.  The Law could not reach him now, even if it knew where he was.  And before it began its hunt for him again in the spring he would be hiking southward, to the Girl and the Baby, and it would still be hunting for him when they three would be making a new home for themselves in some other part of the world.  For the first time in months he was almost happy.  He closed and bolted the door, and began to whistle.  He was amazed at the change in himself, and wonderingly he stared at his reflection in the cracked bit of mirror against the wall.  He grinned, and addressed himself aloud.