The hollow cough of Mukee's father was smothered in the thick fur of
his cap as he thrust his head from his little shack in the edge of the
forest. A score of eyes watched Cummins as he came out into the snow,
and the rough, loyal hearts of those who looked throbbed in fearful
anticipation of the word he might be bringing to them.

Sometimes a nation ceases to breathe in the last moments of its dying
chief, and the black wings of calamity gather over its people,
enshrouding them in a strange gloom and a stranger fear; and so,
because the greatest of all tragedies had come into their little
world, Cummins' people were speechless in their grief and their
waiting for the final word. And when the word came to them at last,
and passed from lip to lip, and from one grim, tense face to another,
the doors closed again, and the lights went out one by one, until
there remained only the yellow eye of the factor's office and the
faint glow from the little cabin in which John Cummins knelt with his
sobbing face crushed close to that of his dead.

There was no one who noticed Jan Thoreau when he came through the door
of the factor's office. His coat of caribou-skin was in tatters. His
feet thrust themselves from the toes of his moccasins. His face was so
thin and white that it shone with the pallor of death from its frame
of straight dark hair. His eyes gleamed like black diamonds. The
madness of hunger was in him.

An hour before, death had been gripping at his throat, when he
stumbled upon the lights of the post, That night he would have died in
the deep snows. Wrapped in its thick coat of bearskin he clutched his
violin to his breast, and sank down in a ragged heap beside the hot
stove. His eyes traveled about him in fierce demand. There is no