for he was on what his comrades at the Landing called a "bad
assignment."

"If anything happens to me," Carrigan had said to McVane, "there
isn't anybody in particular to notify. I lost out in the matter of
family a long time ago."

He was not a man who talked much about himself, even to the
superintendent of "N" Division, yet there were a thousand who
loved Dave Carrigan, and many who placed their confidences in him.
Superintendent Me Vane had one story which he might have told, but
he kept it to himself, instinctively sensing the sacredness of it.
Even Carrigan did not know that the one thing which never passed
his lips was known to McVane.

Of that, too, he had been thinking an hour ago. It was the thing
which, first of all, had driven him into the north. And though it
had twisted and disrupted the earth under his feet for a time, it
had brought its compensation. For he had come to love the north
with a passionate devotion. It was, in a way, his God. It seemed
to him that the time had never been when he had lived any other
life than this under the open skies. He was thirty-seven now. A
bit of a philosopher, as philosophy comes to one in a sun-cleaned
and unpolluted air, A good-humored brother of humanity, even when
he put manacles on other men's wrists; graying a little over the
temples--and a lover of life. Above all else he was that. A lover
of life. A worshiper at the shrine of God's Country.

So he sat, that hour ago, deep in the wilderness eighty miles
north of Athabasca Landing, congratulating himself on the present