was rising from out of the spruce. It blurred before his eyes, and a
sobbing break came in his low cry of Isobel's name. Then he turned
once more back into the loneliness and desolation of his old life.

"I'm coming, Pelly," he laughed, in a strained, hard way. "I haven't
given you exactly a square deal, old man, but I'll hustle and make up
for lost time!"

A wind was beginning to moan in the spruce tops again. He was glad of
that. It promised storm. And a storm would cover up all trails.

VII

THE MADNESS OF PELLITER

Away up at Fullerton Point amid the storm and crash of the arctic
gloom Pelliter fought himself through day after day of fever, waiting
for MacVeigh. At first he had been filled with hope. That first
glimpse of the sun they had seen through the little window on the
morning that Billy left for Fort Churchill had come just in time to
keep reason from snapping in his head. For three days after that he
looked through the window at the same hour and prayed moaningly for
another glimpse of that paradise in the southern sky. But the storm
through which Isobel had struggled across the Barren gathered over his
head and behind him, day after day of it, rolling and twisting and
moaning with the roar of the cracking fields of ice, bringing back
once more the thick death-gloom of the arctic night that had almost
driven him mad. He tried to think only of Billy, of his loyal
comrade's race into the south, and of the precious letters he would
bring back to him; and he kept track of the days by making pencil