His search for Cummins now had something of madness in it.  It was his one hope—­where to the other six there was no hope.  And one day this spark went out of him.  The crust was gone.  The snow was settling.  Beyond the lake he found the chasm between the two mountains, and, miles of this chasm, robbed to the bones of flesh, he found Cummins.  The bones, and Cummins’ gun, and all that was left of him, he buried in a crevasse.

He waited until night to return to the post.  Only one light was burning when he came out into the clearing, and that was the light in the woman’s cabin.  In the edge of the balsams he sat down to watch it, as he had watched it a hundred nights before.  Suddenly something came between him and the light.  Against the cabin he saw the shadow of a human form, and as silently as the steely flash of the Aurora over his head, as swiftly as a lean deer, he sped through the gloom of the forest’s edge and came up behind the home of the woman and her child.  With the caution of a lynx, his head close to the snow, he peered around the end of the logs.  It was the Englishman who stood looking through the tear in the curtained window!  Jan’s moccasined feet made no sound.  His hand fell as gently as a child’s upon the Englishman’s arm.

“Thees is not the honor of the Beeg Snows!” he whispered.  “Come.”

A sickly pallor filled the Englishman’s face.  But Jan’s voice was soft and dispassionate, his touch was velvety in its hint, and he went with the guiding hand away from the curtained window, smiling in a companionable way.  Jan’s teeth gleamed back.  The Englishman chuckled.  Then Jan’s hands changed.  They flew to the thick reddening throat of the man from civilization, and without a sound the two sank together upon the snow.  It was many minutes before Jan rose to his feet.  The next day Williams set out for Fort Churchill with word for the Company’s home office that the Englishman had died in the “Beeg Snow,” which was true.

The end was not far away now.  Jan was expecting it day by day, hour by hour.  But it came in a way that he did not expect.  A month had gone, and Cummins had not come up from among the Crees.  At times there was a strange light in the woman’s eyes as she questioned the men at the post.  Then, one day, the factor’s son told Jan that she wanted to see him in the little cabin at the other end of the clearing.

A shiver went through him as he came to the door.  It was more than a spirit of unrest in Jan to-day, more than suspicion, more than his old dread of that final moment of the tragedy he was playing, which would condemn him to everlasting perdition in the woman’s eyes.  It was pain, poignant, terrible—­something which he could not name, something upon which he could place his hand, and yet which filled him with a desire to throw himself upon his face in the snow and sob out his grief as he had seen the little children do.  It was not dread, but the torment of reality, that