Isobel | Page 2

and the
black rocks staring at us as they've stared for a million centuries. There
may be glory in it, but that's all. We're 'eroes all right, but there's no one
knows it but ourselves and the six hundred and forty-nine other men of
the Royal Mounted. My God, what I'd give for the sight of a girl's face,
for just a moment's touch of her hand! It would drive out this fever, for
it's the fever of loneliness, Mac-- a sort of madness, and it's splitting my
'ead."

"Tush, tush!" said MacVeigh, taking his mate's hand. "Wake up, Pelly!
Think of what's coming. Only a few months more of it, and we'll be
changed. And then-- think of what a heaven you'll be entering. You'll
be able to enjoy it more than the other fellows, for they've never had
this. And I'm going to bring you back a letter-- from the little girl--"
Pelliter's face brightened.
"God bless her!" he exclaimed. "There'll be letters from her-- a dozen
of them. She's waited a long time for me, and she's true to the bottom of
her dear heart. You've got my letter safe?"
"Yes."
MacVeigh went back to the rough little table and added still further to
his report to the Commissioner of the Royal Mounted in the following
words:
"Pelliter is sick with a strange trouble in his head. At times I have been
afraid he was going mad, and if he lives I advise his transfer south at an
early date. I am leaving for Churchill two weeks ahead of the usual
time in order to get medicines. I also wish to add a word to what I said
about wolves in my last report. We have seem them repeatedly in packs
of from fifty to one thousand. Late this autumn a pack attacked a large
herd of traveling caribou fifteen miles in from the Bay, and we counted
the remands of one hundred and sixty animals killed over a distance of
less than three miles. It is my opinion that the wolves kill at least five
thousand caribou in this patrol each year.
"I have the honor to be, sir,
"Your obedient servant, " WILLIAM MACVEIGH, Sergeant, "In
charge of detachment."
He folded the report, placed it with other treasures in the waterproof
rubber bag which always went into his pack, and returned to Pelliter's
side.
"I hate to leave you alone, Pelly," he said. "But I'll make a fast trip of
it-- four hundred and fifty miles over the ice, and I'll do it in ten days or
bust. Then ten days back, mebbe two weeks, and you'll have the
medicines and the letters. Hurrah!"
"Hurrah!" cried Pelliter.
He turned his face a little to the wall. Something rose up in MacVeigh's
throat and choked him as he gripped Pelliter's hand.
"My God, Bill, is that the sun ?" suddenly cried Pelliter.

MacVeigh wheeled toward the one window of the cabin. The sick man
tumbled from his bunk. Together they stood for a moment at the
window, staring far to the south and east, where a faint red rim of gold
shot up through the leaden sky.
"It's the sun," said MacVeigh, like one speaking a prayer.
"The first in four months," breathed Pelliter.
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,