mothers who bore them. But the other goeth at a different time--"
At this point the light in Pretty Pierre's hand flickered and went out,
and through the darkness there came a voice, the voice of an idiot, that
whimpered: "Grah want pipe--Annie, Annie dead."

The angel of wisdom was gone, and chaos spluttered on the lolling lips
again; the Idiot sat feeling for the pipe that he had dropped.

And never again through the days that came and went could Pierre, by any
conjuring, or any swaying torch, make the fool into a man again. The
devils of confusion were returned forever. But there had been one
glimpse of the god. And it was as the Idiot had said when he saw with
the eyes of that god: no more blood was shed. The garrison of this fort
held it unmolested. The besiegers knew not that two men only stayed
within the walls; and because the chief begged to be taken south to die,
they left the place surrounded by its moats of ice and its trenches of
famine; and they came not back.

But other foes more deadly than the angry heathen came, and they were
called Hunger and Loneliness. The one destroyeth the body and the other
the brain. But Grah was not lonely, nor did he hunger. He blew his
bubbles, and muttered of a wind whereon a useless thing--a film of water,
a butterfly, or a fool--might ride beyond the reach of spirit, or man,
or heathen. His flesh remained the same, and grew not less; but that of
Pierre wasted, and his eye grew darker with suffering. For man is only
man, and hunger is a cruel thing. To give one's food to feed a fool, and
to search the silent plains in vain for any living thing to kill, is a
matter for angels to do and bear, and not mere mortals. But this man had
a strength of his own like to his code of living, which was his own and
not another's. And at last, when spring leaped gaily forth from the grey