The Rivers End | Page 6

roar
and snarl and rending thunder of the great fields of ice as they swept
down with the arctic current into Hudson's Bay. Over him hovered a
strange night. It was not black but a weird and wraith-like gray, and out
of this sepulchral chaos came strange sounds and the moaning of a
wind high up. A little while longer, Keith thought, and the thing would
have driven him mad. Even now he fancied he heard the screaming and
wailing of voices far up under the hidden stars. More than once in the
past months he had listened to the sobbing of little children, the agony
of weeping women, and the taunting of wind voices that were either
tormenting or crying out in a ghoulish triumph; and more than once in
those months he had seen Eskimos--born in that hell but driven mad in
the torture of its long night--rend the clothes from their bodies and
plunge naked out into the pitiless gloom and cold to die. Conniston
would never know how near the final breakdown his brain had been in
that hour when he made him a prisoner. And Keith had not told him.
The man-hunter bad saved him from going mad. But Keith had kept
that secret to himself.
Even now he shrank down as a blast of wind shot out of the chaos
above and smote the cabin with a shriek that had in it a peculiarly
penetrating note. And then he squared his shoulders and laughed, and
the yapping of the foxes no longer filled him with a shuddering torment.
Beyond them he was seeing home. God's country! Green forests and
waters spattered with golden sun--things he had almost forgotten; once
more the faces of women who were white. And with those faces he
heard the voice of his people and the song of birds and felt under his
feet the velvety touch of earth that was bathed in the aroma of flowers.

Yes, he had almost forgotten those things. Yesterday they had been
with him only as moldering skeletons--phantasmal
dream-things--because he was going mad, but now they were real, they
were just off there to the south, and he was going to them. He stretched
up his arms, and a cry rose out of his throat. It was of triumph, of final
exaltation. Three years of THAT--and he had lived through it! Three
years of dodging from burrow to burrow, just as Conniston had said,
like a hunted fox; three years of starvation, of freezing, of loneliness so
great that his soul had broken--and now he was going home!
He turned again to the cabin, and when he entered the pale face of the
dying Englishman greeted him from the dim glow of the yellow light at
the table. And Conniston was smiling in a quizzical, distressed sort of
way, with a hand at his chest. His open watch on the table pointed to
the hour of midnight when the lesson went on.
Still later he heated the muzzle of his revolver in the flame of the
seal-oil.
"It will hurt, old chap--putting this scar over your eye. But it's got to be
done. I say, won't it be a ripping joke on McDowell?" Softly he
repeated it, smiling into Keith's eyes. "A ripping joke--on McDowell!"

III
Dawn--the dusk of another night--and Keith raised his haggard face
from Conniston's bedside with a woman's sob on his lips. The
Englishman had died as he knew that he would die, game to the last
threadbare breath that came out of his body. For with this last breath he
whispered the words which he had repeated a dozen times before,
"Remember, old chap, you win or lose the moment McDowell first sets
his eyes on you!" And then, with a strange kind of sob in his chest, he
was gone, and Keith's eyes were blinded by the miracle of a hot flood
of tears, and there rose in him a mighty pride in the name of Derwent
Conniston.

It was his name now. John Keith was dead. It was Derwent Conniston
who was living. And as he looked down into the cold, still face of the
heroic Englishman, the thing did not seem so strange to him after all. It
would not be difficult to bear Conniston's name; the difficulty would be
in living up to the Conniston code.
That night the rumble of the ice fields was clearer because there was no
wind to deaden their tumult. The sky was cloudless, and the stars were
like glaring, yellow eyes peering through holes in a vast, overhanging
curtain of jet black. Keith, out to fill his lungs with air, looked up at the
phenomenon of the polar night and shuddered. The stars were like
living things, and they were