became audible accentuators of the silence.

Ham heard them all and to him they were like the wretched echoes of a
jail where the small clicking night-sounds creep into dreams and poison
them with reminders of confinement. His brain was hot with a fever of
restiveness and beyond his cell-like room he saw the world from which he
was barred: the world which the tongueless voice in his heart kept
heralding to him as his own world to conquer.

In another bed across the carpetless floor rose and fell the even breath
of Edwardes, who was sleeping as a man sleeps after fighting a blizzard.
Under the boy's own hot cheek was the roughness of a slipless pillow and
his limbs thrashed between coarse sheets that covered a lumpy mattress.

Out beyond the barriers of the snow-stifled mountains stretched endless
continents and seas inviting his soul. Men of alien races and alien
thought trod lands where palm trees nodded along white beaches and where
the sea was blue as sapphire. Thousands of miles away were deserts
agleam with gold and caravans swinging between the burning arch of the
sky and the scorching sands. Great cities rose before his eyes,
beckoning him, calling to him: brooding cities of gray turrets and foggy
streets; strange cities lit with sunset fires on domes and minarets;
laughing cities gay with festivals. All these things he was hungry to
see; to see as a master of the world walking its varied ways, achieving
its affairs. Through his waking dreams marched a parade of great
figures, Hannibal, Cæsar the Corsican, Talleyrand, Disraeli, Montagu,
Pitt, the men with whom this tongueless voice proclaimed his
brotherhood; the men who had found life's granite as hard as that which
lay heaped about him, who had conquered it and chiseled it into
monuments of history. His hand slipped under his pillow and closed on