his lantern. "That's the hell o' railroading it along the edge of the
Arctic. When you git snowed in you're _snowed in_, an' there ain't no
two ways about it!"

He paused at the smoking compartment, thrust in his head for a moment,
passed on and slammed the door of the car after him as he went into the
next coach.

In that smoking compartment there were two men, facing each other across
the narrow space between the two seats. They had not looked up when the
train-man thrust in his head. They seemed, as one leaned over toward the
other, wholly oblivious of the storm.

It was the older man who bent forward. He was about fifty. The hand that
rested for a moment on David Raine's knee was red and knotted. It was
the hand of a man who had lived his life in struggling with the
wilderness. And the face, too, was of such a man; a face coloured and
toughened by the tannin of wind and blizzard and hot northern sun, with
eyes cobwebbed about by a myriad of fine lines that spoke of years spent
under the strain of those things. He was not a large man. He was shorter
than David Raine. There was a slight droop to his shoulders. Yet about
him there was a strength, a suppressed energy ready to act, a zestful
eagerness for life and its daily mysteries which the other and younger
man did not possess. Throughout many thousands of square miles of the
great northern wilderness this older man was known as Father Roland, the
Missioner.

His companion was not more than thirty-eight. Perhaps he was a year or
two younger. It may be that the wailing of the wind outside, the strange
voices that were in it and the chilling gloom of their little