"TO cook by your fire and to sleep under your roof for the night,"
I had announced on entering old Ebbits's cabin; and he had looked
at me blear-eyed and vacuous, while Zilla had favored me with a
sour face and a contemptuous grunt. Zilla was his wife, and no
more bitter-tongued, implacable old squaw dwelt on the Yukon. Nor
would I have stopped there had my dogs been less tired or had the
rest of the village been inhabited. But this cabin alone had I
found occupied, and in this cabin, perforce, I took my shelter.

Old Ebbits now and again pulled his tangled wits together, and
hints and sparkles of intelligence came and went in his eyes.
Several times during the preparation of my supper he even essayed
hospitable inquiries about my health, the condition and number of
my dogs, and the distance I had travelled that day. And each time
Zilla had looked sourer than ever and grunted more contemptuously.

Yet I confess that there was no particular call for cheerfulness on
their part. There they crouched by the fire, the pair of them, at
the end of their days, old and withered and helpless, racked by
rheumatism, bitten by hunger, and tantalized by the frying-odors of
my abundance of meat. They rocked back and forth in a slow and
hopeless way, and regularly, once every five minutes, Ebbits
emitted a low groan. It was not so much a groan of pain, as of
pain-weariness. He was oppressed by the weight and the torment of
this thing called life, and still more was he oppressed by the fear
of death. His was that eternal tragedy of the aged, with whom the
joy of life has departed and the instinct for death has not come.