The gloom gathered in, and yet it was not darkness as the darkness of night is known a thousand miles south.  It was the dusky twilight of day where the sun rises at three o’clock in the morning and still throws its ruddy light in the western sky at nine o’clock at night; where the poplar buds unfold themselves into leaf before one’s very eyes; where strawberries are green in the morning and red in the afternoon; where, a little later, one could read newspaper print until midnight by the glow of the sun—­ and between the rising and the setting of that sun there would be from eighteen to twenty hours of day.  It was evening time in the wonderland of the north, a wonderland hard and frozen and ridden by pain and death in winter, but a paradise upon earth in this month of June.

The beauty of it filled Carrigan’s soul, even as he lay on his back in the damp sand.  Far south of him steam and steel were coming, and the world would soon know that it was easy to grow wheat at the Arctic Circle, that cucumbers grew to half the size of a man’s arm, that flowers smothered the land and berries turned it scarlet and black.  He had dreaded these days—­days of what he called “the great discovery”—­the time when a crowded civilization would at last understand how the fruits of the earth leaped up to the call of twenty hours of sun each day, even though that earth itself was eternally frozen if one went down under its surface four feet with a pick and shovel.

Tonight the gloom came earlier because of the clouds in the west.  It was very still.  Even the breeze had ceased to come from up the river.  And as Carrigan listened, exulting in the thought that the coolness of the wet sand was drawing the fever from him, he heard another sound.  At first he thought it was the splashing of a fish.  But after that it came again, and still again, and he knew that it was the steady and rhythmic dip of paddles.

A thrill shot through him, and he raised himself to his elbow.  Dusk covered the river, and he could not see.  But he heard low voices as the paddles dipped.  And after a little he knew that one of these was the voice of a woman.

His heart gave a big jump.  “She is coming back,” he whispered to himself.  “She is coming back!”

IV

Carrigan’s first impulse, sudden as the thrill that leaped through him, was to cry out to the occupants of the unseen canoe.  Words were on his lips, but he forced them back.  They could not miss him, could not get beyond the reach of his voice—­and he waited.  After all, there might be profit in a reasonable degree of caution.  He crept back toward his rifle, sensing the fact that movement no longer gave him very great distress.  At the same time he lost no sound from the river.  The voices were silent, and the dip, dip, dip of paddles was approaching softly and with extreme caution.  At last he could barely hear the trickle of them, yet he knew the canoe was coming steadily nearer.  There was a suspicious secretiveness in its approach.  Perhaps the lady with the beautiful eyes and the glistening hair had changed her mind again and was returning to put an end to him.