Like starving men the two gazed through the window. The golden light
lingered for a few moments, then died away. Pelliter went back to his
bunk.

Half an hour later four dogs, a sledge, and a man were moving swiftly
through the dead and silent gloom of Arctic day. Sergeant MacVeigh was
on his way to Fort Churchill, more than four hundred miles away.

This is the loneliest journey in the world, the trip down from the
solitary little wind-beaten cabin at Point Fullerton to Fort
Churchill. That cabin has but one rival in the whole of the
Northland-- the other cabin at Herschel Island, at the mouth of the
Firth, where twenty-one wooden crosses mark twenty-one white men's
graves. But whalers come to Herschel. Unless by accident, or to break
the laws, they never come in the neighborhood of Fullerton. It is at
Fullerton that men die of the most terrible thing in the world--
loneliness. In the little cabin men have gone mad.

The gloomy truth oppressed MacVeigh as he guided his dog team over the
ice into the south. He was afraid for Pelliter. He prayed that
Pelliter might see the sun now and then. On the second day he stopped
at a cache of fish which they had put up in the early autumn for dog
feed. He stopped at a second cache on the fifth day, and spent the
sixth night at an Eskimo igloo at Blind Eskimo Point. Late en the
ninth day he came into Fort Churchill, with an average of fifty miles
a day to his credit.

From Fullerton men came in nearer dead than alive when they made the
hazard in winter. MacVeigh's face was raw from the beat of the wind.