reasonable to suppose that he had bartered for it with some white
man in the years before he had become an outlaw, and that some
curious fancy or superstition had inspired him in its possession.
But Philip had ceased to be influenced by reason alone. Sharply
opposed to reason was that consciousness within him which told him
that the hair had been freshly cut from a woman's head. He had no
argument with which to drive home the logic of this belief even
with himself, and yet he found it impossible not to accept that
belief fully and unequivocally. There was, or HAD been, a woman
with Bram--and as he thought of the length and beauty and rare
texture of the silken strand in his pocket he could not repress a
shudder at the possibilities the situation involved. Bram--and a
woman! And a woman with hair like that!

He left his tree after a time. For another hour he paced slowly
back and forth at the edge of the Barren, his senses still keyed
to the highest point of caution. Then he rebuilt his fire, pausing
every few moments in the operation to listen for a suspicious
sound. It was very cold. He noticed, after a little, that the
weird sound of the lights over the Pole had become only a ghostly
whisper. The stars were growing dimmer, and he watched them as
they seemed slowly to recede farther and farther away from the
world of which he was a part. This dying out of the stars always
interested him. It was one of the miracles of the northern world
that lay just under the long Arctic night which, a few hundred
miles beyond the Barren, was now at its meridian. It seemed to him
as though ten thousand invisible hands were sweeping under the
heavens extinguishing the lights first in ones and twos and then
in whole constellations. It preceded by perhaps half an hour the
utter and chaotic blackness that comes before the northern dawn,