After that he gave Keith his worn Service Manual and commanded him to study while he rested.  Keith helped him to his bunk, and for a time after that tried to read the Service book.  But his eyes blurred, and his brain refused to obey.  The agony in the Englishman’s low breathing oppressed him with a physical pain.  Keith felt himself choking and rose at last from the table and went out into the gray, ghostly twilight of the night.

His lungs drank in the ice-tanged air.  But it was not cold.  Kwaske-hoo—­the change—­had come.  The air was filled with the tumult of the last fight of winter against the invasion of spring, and the forces of winter were crumbling.  The earth under Keith’s feet trembled in the mighty throes of their dissolution.  He could hear more clearly the roar and snarl and rending thunder of the great fields of ice as they swept down with the arctic current into Hudson’s Bay.  Over him hovered a strange night.  It was not black but a weird and wraith-like gray, and out of this sepulchral chaos came strange sounds and the moaning of a wind high up.  A little while longer, Keith thought, and the thing would have driven him mad.  Even now he fancied he heard the screaming and wailing of voices far up under the hidden stars.  More than once in the past months he had listened to the sobbing of little children, the agony of weeping women, and the taunting of wind voices that were either tormenting or crying out in a ghoulish triumph; and more than once in those months he had seen Eskimos—­born in that hell but driven mad in the torture of its long night—­rend the clothes from their bodies and plunge naked out into the pitiless gloom and cold to die.  Conniston would never know how near the final breakdown his brain had been in that hour when he made him a prisoner.  And Keith had not told him.  The man-hunter had saved him from going mad.  But Keith had kept that secret to himself.

Even now he shrank down as a blast of wind shot out of the chaos above and smote the cabin with a shriek that had in it a peculiarly penetrating note.  And then he squared his shoulders and laughed, and the yapping of the foxes no longer filled him with a shuddering torment.  Beyond them he was seeing home.  God’s country!  Green forests and waters spattered with golden sun—­things he had almost forgotten; once more the faces of women who were white.  And with those faces he heard the voice of his people and the song of birds and felt under his feet the velvety touch of earth that was bathed in the aroma of flowers.  Yes, he had almost forgotten those things.  Yesterday they had been with him only as moldering skeletons—­phantasmal dream-things—­because he was going mad, but now they were real, they were just off there to the south, and he was going to them.  He stretched up his arms, and a cry rose out of his throat.  It was of triumph, of final exaltation.  Three years of that—­and he had lived through it!  Three years of dodging from burrow to burrow, just as Conniston had said, like a hunted fox; three years of starvation, of freezing, of loneliness so great that his soul had broken—­and now he was going home!