He tried to laugh at his own little joke, but it was a ghastly attempt and his purpling lips closed tightly as he stumbled down the ridge.  As his legs grew weaker and his blood more sluggish, his mind seemed to work faster, and the multitude of thoughts that surged through his brain made him oblivious of the first gnawing of a strange dull pain.  He was freezing.  He knew that without feeling pain.  He had before him, not hours, but minutes of life, and he knew that, too.  His arms might have been cut off at the shoulders for all feeling that was left in them; he noticed, as he stumbled along in a half run, that he could not bend his fingers.  At every step his legs grew heavier and his feet were now leaden weights.  Yet he was surprised to find that the first horror of his situation had left him.  It did not seem that death was only a few hundred yards away, and he found himself thinking of MacGregor, of home, and then only of Isobel.  He wondered, after that, if some one of the other four had played the game, and lost, in this same way, and he wondered, too, if his bones would never be found, as theirs had never been.

He stopped again on a snow ridge.  He had come a quarter of a mile, though it seemed that he had traveled ten times that distance.

“Sixty degrees below zero—­and it’s the vindication of the law!”

His voice scarcely broke between his purple lips now, and the bitter sweep of wind swayed him as he stood.

Chapter XI.  The Law Versus The Man

Suddenly a great thrill shot through Philip, and for an instant he stood rigid.  What was that he saw out in the gray gloom of Arctic desolation, creeping up, up, up, almost black at its beginning, and dying away like a ghostly winding-sheet?  A gurgling cry rose in his throat, and he went on, panting now like a broken-winded beast in his excitement.  It grew near, blacker, warmer.  He fancied that he could feel its heat, which was the new fire of life blazing within him.

He went down between two great drifts into a pit which seemed bottomless.  He crawled to the top of the second, using his pulseless hands like sticks in the snow, and at the top something rose from the other side of the drift to meet him.

It was a face, a fierce, bearded face, the gaunt starvation in it hidden by his own blindness.  It seemed like the face of an ogre, terrible, threatening, and he knew that it was the face of William DeBar, the seventh brother.

He launched himself forward, and the other launched himself forward, and they met in a struggle which was pathetic in its weakness, and rolled together to the bottom of the drift.  Yet the struggle was no less terrible because of that weakness.  It was a struggle between two lingering sparks of human life and when these two sparks had flickered and blazed and died down, the two men lay gasping, an arm’s reach from each other.