Children of the Frost | Page 2

a taste or
smell.... Any tobacco?... Ah, thanks, and a pipe? Good. Now for a fire-stick and we'll see
if the weed has lost its cunning."
He scratched the match with the painstaking care of the woodsman, cherished its young
flame as though there were never another in all the world, and drew in the first mouthful
of smoke. This he retained meditatively for a time, and blew out through his pursed lips
slowly and caressingly. Then his face seemed to soften as he leaned back, and a soft blur
to film his eyes. He sighed heavily, happily, with immeasurable content, and then said
suddenly:
"God! But that tastes good!"
Van Brunt nodded sympathetically. "Five years, you say?"
"Five years." The man sighed again. "And you, I presume, wish to know about it, being
naturally curious, and this a sufficiently strange situation, and all that. But it's not much. I
came in from Edmonton after musk-ox, and like Pike and the rest of them, had my
mischances, only I lost my party and outfit. Starvation, hardship, the regular tale, you
know, sole survivor and all that, till I crawled into Tantlatch's, here, on hand and knee."

"Five years," Van Brunt murmured retrospectively, as though turning things over in his
mind.
"Five years on February last. I crossed the Great Slave early in May--"
"And you are ... Fairfax?" Van Brunt interjected.
The man nodded.
"Let me see ... John, I think it is, John Fairfax."
"How did you know?" Fairfax queried lazily, half-absorbed in curling smoke-spirals
upward in the quiet air.
"The papers were full of it at the time. Prevanche--"
"Prevanche!" Fairfax sat up, suddenly alert. "He was lost in the Smoke Mountains."
"Yes, but he pulled through and came out."
Fairfax settled back again and resumed his smoke-spirals. "I am glad to hear it," he
remarked reflectively. "Prevanche was a bully fellow if he did have ideas about
head-straps, the beggar. And he pulled through? Well, I'm glad."
Five years ... the phrase drifted recurrently through Van Brunt's thought, and somehow
the face of Emily Southwaithe seemed to rise up and take form before him. Five years ...
A wedge of wild-fowl honked low overhead and at sight of the encampment veered
swiftly to the north into the smouldering sun. Van Brunt could not follow them. He
pulled out his watch. It was an hour past midnight. The northward clouds flushed
bloodily, and rays of sombre-red shot southward, firing the gloomy woods with a lurid
radiance. The air was in breathless calm, not a needle quivered, and the least sounds of
the camp were distinct and clear as trumpet calls. The Crees and voyageurs felt the spirit
of it and mumbled in dreamy undertones, and the cook unconsciously subdued the clatter
of pot and pan. Somewhere a child was crying, and from the depths of the forest, like a
silver thread, rose a woman's voice in mournful chant:
"O-o-o-o-o-o-a-haa-ha-a-ha-aa-a-a, O-o-o-o-o-o-a-ha-a-ha-a."
Van Brunt shivered and rubbed the backs of his hands briskly.
"And they gave me up for dead?" his companion asked slowly.
"Well, you never came back, so your friends--"
"Promptly forgot." Fairfax laughed harshly, defiantly.
"Why didn't you come out?"
"Partly disinclination, I suppose, and partly because of circumstances over which I had no

control. You see, Tantlatch, here, was down with a broken leg when I made his
acquaintance,--a nasty fracture,--and I set it for him and got him into shape. I stayed some
time, getting my strength back. I was the first white man he had seen, and of course I
seemed very wise and showed his people no end of things. Coached them up in military
tactics, among other things, so that they conquered the four other tribal villages, (which
you have not yet seen), and came to rule the land. And they naturally grew to think a
good deal of me, so much so that when I was ready to go they wouldn't hear of it. Were
most hospitable, in fact. Put a couple of guards over me and watched me day and night.
And then Tantlatch offered me inducements,--in a sense, inducements,--so to say, and as
it didn't matter much one way or the other, I reconciled myself to remaining."
"I knew your brother at Freiburg. I am Van Brunt."
Fairfax reached forward impulsively and shook his hand. "You were Billy's friend, eh?
Poor Billy! He spoke of you often."
"Rum meeting place, though," he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial
landscape and listening for a moment to the woman's mournful notes. "Her man was
clawed by a bear, and she's taking it hard."
"Beastly life!" Van Brunt grimaced his disgust. "I suppose, after five years of it,
civilization will be sweet? What do you say?"
Fairfax's face took on a stolid