scanning the narrowing sweep of the lake ahead of him.

He felt like a boy, and he chuckled as he thought of the definite
reason for it. For twenty-three months he had been like a piece of
rubber stretched to a tension--sometimes almost to the snapping
point. Now had come the reaction, and he was going HOME. Home! It
was that one word that caused a shadow to flit over his face, and
only once or twice had he forgotten and let it slip between his
lips. At least he was returning to civilization--getting AWAY from
the everlasting drone of breaking ice and the clack-clack tongue
of the Eskimo.

With the stub of a pencil Philip had figured out on a bit of paper
about where he was that morning. The whalebone hut of his last
Arctic camp was eight hundred miles due north. Fort Churchill,
over on Hudson's Bay, was four hundred miles to the east, and Fort
Resolution, on the Great Slave, was four hundred miles to the
west. On his map he had drawn a heavy circle about Prince Albert,
six hundred miles to the south. That was the nearest line of rail.
Six days back Radisson had died after a mouth's struggle with that
terrible thing they called "le mort rouge," or the Red Death.
Since then Philip had pointed his canoe straight UP the Dubawnt
waterways, and was a hundred and twenty miles nearer to
civilization. He had been through these waterways twice before,
and he knew that there was not a white man within a hundred and
fifty miles of him. And as for a white woman--

Weyman stopped his paddling where there was no current, and leaned
back in his canoe for a breathing space, and to fill his pipe. A
WHITE WOMAN! Would he stare at her like a fool when he saw her