Bram stretched out an arm.

"There!"

It was the one question he answered, and he pointed straight as
the needle of a compass into the north. And then, as if his crude
sense of humor had been touched by the other thing Philip had
asked, he burst into a laugh. It made one shudder to see laughter
in a face like Bram's. It transformed his countenance from mere
ugliness into one of the leering gargoyles carven under the
cornices of ancient buildings. It was this laugh, heard almost at
Bram's elbow, that made Philip suddenly grip hard at a new
understanding--the laugh and the look in Bram's eyes. It set him
throbbing, and filled him all at once with the desire to seize his
companion by his great shoulders and shake speech from his thick
lips. In that moment, even before the laughter had gone from
Bram's face, he thought again of Pelletier. Pelletier must have
been like this--in those terrible days when he scribbled the
random thoughts of a half-mad man on his cabin door.

Bram was not yet mad. And yet he was fighting the thing that had
killed Pelletier. Loneliness. The fate forced upon him by the law
because he had killed a man.

His face was again heavy and unemotional when with a gesture he
made Philip understand that he was to ride on the sledge. Bram
himself went to the head of the pack. At the sharp clack of his
Eskimo the wolves strained in their traces. Another moment and
they were off, with Bram in the lead.