“Why did you do that?” he whispered; but the other made no sign.  He tried to rise, but his knees relaxed; he staggered and fell.  At last he gained his feet and made for the door; then, when his hand was on the knob, McNamara spoke through his teeth, without removing his cigar.

“Don’t ever talk about her again.  She is going to marry me.”

When he was alone he looked curiously up at the ceiling over his head.  “The rats are thick in this shack,” he mused.  “Seems to me I heard a whole swarm of them.”

A few moments later a figure crept through the hole in the roof of the house next door and thence down into the street.  A block ahead was the slow-moving form of Attorney Struve.  Had a stranger met them both he would not have known which of the two had felt at his throat the clutch of a strangler, for each was drawn and haggard and swayed as he went.

Glenister unconsciously turned towards his cabin, but at leaving the lighted streets the thought of its darkness and silence made him shudder.  Not now!  He could not bear that stillness and the company of his thoughts.  He dared not be alone.  Dextry would be down-town, undoubtedly, and he, too, must get into the light and turmoil.  He licked his lips and found that they were cracked and dry.

At rare intervals during the past years he had staggered in from a long march where, for hours, he had waged a bitter war with cold and hunger, his limbs clumsy with fatigue, his garments wet and stiff, his mind slack and sullen.  At such extreme seasons he had felt a consuming thirst, a thirst which burned and scorched until his very bones cried out feverishly.  Not a thirst for water, nor a thirst which eaten snow could quench, but a savage yearning of his whole exhausted system for some stimulant, for some coursing fiery fluid that would burn and strangle.  A thirst for whiskey—­for brandy!  Remembering these occasional ferocious desires, he had become charitable to such unfortunates as were too weak to withstand similar temptations.

Now with a shock he caught himself in the grip of a thirst as insistent as though the cold bore down and the weariness of endless heavy miles wrapped him about.  It was no foolish wish to drown his thoughts nor to banish the grief that preyed upon him, but only thirst!  Thirst!—­a crying, trembling, physical lust to quench the fires that burned inside.  He remembered that it had been more than a year since he had tasted whiskey.  Now the fever of the past few hours had parched his every tissue.

As he elbowed in through the crowd at the Northern, those next him made room at the bar for they recognized the hunger that peers thus from men’s faces.  Their manner recalled Glenister to his senses, and he wrenched himself away.  This was not some solitary, snow-banked road-house.  He would not stand and soak himself, shoulder to shoulder with stevedores and longshoremen.  This was something to be done in secret.  He had no pride in it.  The man on his right raised a glass, and the young man strangled a madness to tear it from his hands.  Instead, he hurried back to the theatre and up to a box, where he drew the curtains.