When he rounded the elbow of the mountain, he did not try to keep back the joyous cry that came to his lips.  Ahead of him there were lights.  A few of them were scattered, but nearest to him he saw a cluster of them, like the glow that comes from a number of illumined windows.  He quickened his pace as he drew nearer to them, and at last he wanted to run.  And then something stopped him, and it seemed to him that his heart had risen into his throat and was choking him until he could not breathe.

It was a man’s voice he heard, calling through the twilight gloom a name.  “Marette—­Marette—­Marette—­”

Kent tried to cry out, but his breath came only in a gasp.  He felt himself trembling.  He reached out his arms, and a strange madness rushed like fire into his brain.

Again the voice called, “Marette—­Marette—­Marette—­”

The cup in the valley echoed the name.  It rolled softly up the mountainside.  The air trembled with it, whispered it, passed it on—­and suddenly the madness in Kent found voice, and he shouted,

“Marette—­Marette—­”

He ran on.  His knees felt weak.  He shouted the name again, and the other voice was silent.  Things loomed up out of the mist ahead of him, between him and the glowing windows.  Some one—­two people—­ were advancing to meet him, doubtfully, wonderingly.  Kent was staggering, but he cried the name again, and this time it was a woman’s cry that answered, and one of the two came toward him swift as a flash of light.

Three paces apart they stood, and in that gloom of the after-twilight their burning eyes looked at each other, while for a space their bodies remained stricken in the face of this miracle of a great and merciful God.

The dead had risen.  By a mighty effort Kent reached out his arms, and Marette swayed to him.  When the other man came up, he found them crumpled to their knees on the earth, clasped like children in each other’s arms.  And as Kent raised his face, he saw that it was Sandy McTrigger who was looking down at him, the man whose life he had saved at Athabasca Landing.

CHAPTER XXV

How long it was before his brain cleared, Kent never could have told.  It might have been a minute or an hour.  Every vital force that was in him had concentrated into a single consciousness—­that the dead had come to life, that it was Marette Radisson, the flesh and blood and living warmth of her, he held in his arms.  Like the flash of a picture on a screen he had seen McTrigger’s face close to him, and then his own head was crushed down again, and if the valley had been filled with the roar of cannon, he would have heard only one sound, a sobbing voice crying over and over again, “Jeems—­Jeems—­Jeems—­”