overhanging curtain of jet black. Keith, out to fill his lungs with
air, looked up at the phenomenon of the polar night and shuddered. The
stars were like living things, and they were looking at him. Under
their sinister glow the foxes were holding high carnival. It seemed to
Keith that they had drawn a closer circle about the cabin and that
there was a different note in their yapping now, a note that was more
persistent, more horrible. Conniston had foreseen that closing-in of
the little white beasts of the night, and Keith, reentering the cabin,
set about the fulfillment of his promise. Ghostly dawn found his task
completed.

Half an hour later he stood in the edge of the scrub timber that rimmed
in the arctic plain, and looked for the last time upon the little cabin
under the floor of which the Englishman was buried. It stood there
splendidly unafraid in its terrible loneliness, a proud monument to a
dead man's courage and a dead man's soul. Within its four walls it
treasured a thing which gave to it at last a reason for being, a reason
for fighting against dissolution as long as one log could hold upon
another. Conniston's spirit had become a living part of it, and the
foxes might yap everlastingly, and the winds howl, and winter follow
winter, and long night follow long night--and it would stand there in
its pride fighting to the last, a memorial to Derwent Conniston, the
Englishman.

Looking back at it, Keith bared his head in the raw dawn. "God bless
you, Conniston," he whispered, and turned slowly away and into the
south.

Ahead of him was eight hundred miles of wilderness--eight hundred miles
between him and the little town on the Saskatchewan where McDowell