marks on the door that opened out upon the gray and purple desolation
of the arctic sea.

At last there came the day when he gave up hope. He believed that he
was dying. He counted the marks on the door and found that there were
sixteen. Just that many days ago Billy had set off with the dogs. If
all had gone well he was a third of the way back, and within another
week would be "home."

Pelliter's thin, fever-flushed face relaxed into a wan smile as he
counted the pencil marks again. Long before that week was ended he
figured that he would be dead. The medicines-- and the letters-- would
come too late, probably four or five days too late. Straight out from
his last mark he drew a long line, and at the end of it added in a
scrawling, almost unintelligible, hand: "Dear Billy, I guess this is
going to be my last day." Then he staggered from the door to the
window.

Out there was what was killing him-- loneliness, a maddening
desolation, a lifeless world that reached for hundreds of miles
farther than his eyes could see. To the north and east there was
nothing but ice, piled-up masses and grinning mountains of it, white
at first, of a somber gray farther off, and then purple and almost
black. There came to him now the low, never-ceasing thunder of the
undercurrents fighting their way down from the Arctic Ocean, broken
now and then by a growling roar as the giant forces sent a crack, like
a great knife, through one of the frozen mountains. He had listened to
those sounds for five months, and in those five months he had heard no
other voice but his own and MacVeigh's and the babble of an Eskimo.
Only once in four months had he seen the sun, and that was on the