his. He fed and watched his torch all night. Snow began to fall; as he
looked up it seemed that the flame made a globe of light in the thick
atmosphere, around which closed a low vault of visible darkness. From
out of this darkness the flakes were falling thickly. When the day broke
he was still alone.




CHAPTER VII.


When Saul and the oxen were once fairly started, they plodded on
steadily. The track lay some way from the river and above it, through
the gap in the hills. Little of the hills did Saul see for he was moving
under trees all the way, and when, before noon, he descended into the
plain on the other side, he was still for a short time under a canopy of
interlacing boughs. There was no road; the trees were notched to show
the track. In such forests there is little obstruction of brushwood, and
over knoll and hollow, between the trunks, the oxen laboured on. Saul
sat on the front ledge of the cart to balance it the better. The coffin,
wedged in with the potash barrel, lay pretty still as long as they kept
on the soft soil of the forest, but when, about one o'clock, the team
emerged upon a corduroy road, made of logs lying side by side across the
path, the jolting often jerked the barrel out of place, and then Saul
would go to the back of the cart and jerk it and the coffin into
position again.

The forest was behind them now. This log road was constructed across a
large tract which sometime since had been cleared by a forest fire, but