and caressingly. Then his face seemed to soften as he leaned back,
and a soft blur to film his eyes. He sighed heavily, happily, with
immeasurable content, and then said suddenly:

"God! But that tastes good!"

Van Brunt nodded sympathetically. "Five years, you say?"

"Five years." The man sighed again. "And you, I presume, wish to know
about it, being naturally curious, and this a sufficiently strange
situation, and all that. But it's not much. I came in from Edmonton
after musk-ox, and like Pike and the rest of them, had my mischances,
only I lost my party and outfit. Starvation, hardship, the regular
tale, you know, sole survivor and all that, till I crawled into
Tantlatch's, here, on hand and knee."

"Five years," Van Brunt murmured retrospectively, as though turning
things over in his mind.

"Five years on February last. I crossed the Great Slave early in
May--"

"And you are ... Fairfax?" Van Brunt interjected.

The man nodded.

"Let me see ... John, I think it is, John Fairfax."

"How did you know?" Fairfax queried lazily, half-absorbed in curling
smoke-spirals upward in the quiet air.