He turned again to the cabin, and when he entered the pale face of the dying Englishman greeted him from the dim glow of the yellow light at the table.  And Conniston was smiling in a quizzical, distressed sort of way, with a hand at his chest.  His open watch on the table pointed to the hour of midnight when the lesson went on.

Still later he heated the muzzle of his revolver in the flame of the seal-oil.

“It will hurt, old chap—­putting this scar over your eye.  But it’s got to be done.  I say, won’t it be a ripping joke on McDowell?” Softly he repeated it, smiling into Keith’s eyes.  “A ripping joke—­on McDowell!”

III

Dawn—­the dusk of another night—­and Keith raised his haggard face from Conniston’s bedside with a woman’s sob on his lips.  The Englishman had died as he knew that he would die, game to the last threadbare breath that came out of his body.  For with this last breath he whispered the words which he had repeated a dozen times before, “Remember, old chap, you win or lose the moment McDowell first sets his eyes on you!” And then, with a strange kind of sob in his chest, he was gone, and Keith’s eyes were blinded by the miracle of a hot flood of tears, and there rose in him a mighty pride in the name of Derwent Conniston.

It was his name now.  John Keith was dead.  It was Derwent Conniston who was living.  And as he looked down into the cold, still face of the heroic Englishman, the thing did not seem so strange to him after all.  It would not be difficult to bear Conniston’s name; the difficulty would be in living up to the Conniston code.

That night the rumble of the ice fields was clearer because there was no wind to deaden their tumult.  The sky was cloudless, and the stars were like glaring, yellow eyes peering through holes in a vast, overhanging curtain of jet black.  Keith, out to fill his lungs with air, looked up at the phenomenon of the polar night and shuddered.  The stars were like living things, and they were looking at him.  Under their sinister glow the foxes were holding high carnival.  It seemed to Keith that they had drawn a closer circle about the cabin and that there was a different note in their yapping now, a note that was more persistent, more horrible.  Conniston had foreseen that closing-in of the little white beasts of the night, and Keith, reentering the cabin, set about the fulfillment of his promise.  Ghostly dawn found his task completed.

Half an hour later he stood in the edge of the scrub timber that rimmed in the arctic plain, and looked for the last time upon the little cabin under the floor of which the Englishman was buried.  It stood there splendidly unafraid in its terrible loneliness, a proud monument to a dead man’s courage and a dead man’s soul.  Within its four walls it treasured a thing which gave to it at last a reason for being, a reason for fighting against dissolution as long as one log could hold upon another.  Conniston’s spirit had become a living part of it, and the foxes might yap everlastingly, and the winds howl, and winter follow winter, and long night follow long night—­and it would stand there in its pride fighting to the last, a memorial to Derwent Conniston, the Englishman.