The Rivers End | Page 7

looking at him. Under their sinister glow
the foxes were holding high carnival. It seemed to Keith that they had
drawn a closer circle about the cabin and that there was a different note
in their yapping now, a note that was more persistent, more horrible.
Conniston had foreseen that closing-in of the little white beasts of the
night, and Keith, reentering the cabin, set about the fulfillment of his
promise. Ghostly dawn found his task completed.
Half an hour later he stood in the edge of the scrub timber that rimmed
in the arctic plain, and looked for the last time upon the little cabin
under the floor of which the Englishman was buried. It stood there
splendidly unafraid in its terrible loneliness, a proud monument to a
dead man's courage and a dead man's soul. Within its four walls it
treasured a thing which gave to it at last a reason for being, a reason for
fighting against dissolution as long as one log could hold upon another.
Conniston's spirit had become a living part of it, and the foxes might
yap everlastingly, and the winds howl, and winter follow winter, and
long night follow long night--and it would stand there in its pride
fighting to the last, a memorial to Derwent Conniston, the Englishman.
Looking back at it, Keith bared his head in the raw dawn. "God bless
you, Conniston," he whispered, and turned slowly away and into the
south.
Ahead of him was eight hundred miles of wilderness--eight hundred
miles between him and the little town on the Saskatchewan where
McDowell commanded Division of the Royal Mounted. The thought of

distance did not appall him. Four years at the top of the earth had
accustomed him to the illimitable and had inured him to the lack of
things. That winter Conniston had followed him with the tenacity of a
ferret for a thousand miles along the rim of the Arctic, and it had been a
miracle that he had not killed the Englishman. A score of times he
might have ended the exciting chase without staining his own hands.
His Eskimo friends would have performed the deed at a word. But he
had let the Englishman live, and Conniston, dead, was sending him
back home. Eight hundred miles was but the step between.
He had no dogs or sledge. His own team had given up the ghost long
ago, and a treacherous Kogmollock from the Roes Welcome had stolen
the Englishman's outfit in the last lap of their race down from
Fullerton's Point. What he carried was Conniston's, with the exception
of his rifle and his own parka and hood. He even wore Conniston's
watch. His pack was light. The chief articles it contained were a little
flour, a three-pound tent, a sleeping-bag, and certain articles of
identification to prove the death of John Keith, the outlaw. Hour after
hour of that first day the zip, zip, zip of his snowshoes beat with deadly
monotony upon his brain. He could not think. Time and again it seemed
to him that something was pulling him back, and always he was
hearing Conniston's voice and seeing Conniston's face in the gray
gloom of the day about him. He passed through the slim finger of scrub
timber that a strange freak of nature had flung across the plain, and
once more was a moving speck in a wide and wind-swept barren. In the
afternoon he made out a dark rim on the southern horizon and knew it
was timber, real timber, the first he had seen since that day, a year and
a half ago, when the last of the Mackenzie River forest had faded away
behind him! It gave him, at last, something tangible to grip. It was a
thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was his
other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the space
between himself and that growing, black rim on the horizon.
He reached it as the twilight of the day was dissolving into the deeper
dusk of the night, and put up his tent in the shelter of a clump of
gnarled and storm-beaten spruce. Then he gathered wood and built
himself a fire. He did not count the sticks as he had counted them for

eighteen months. He was wasteful, prodigal. He had traveled forty
miles since morning but he felt no exhaustion. He gathered wood until
he had a great pile of it, and the flames of his fire leaped higher and
higher until the spruce needles crackled and hissed over his head. He
boiled a pot of weak tea and made a supper of caribou meat and a bit of
bannock. Then he sat with his back to a tree and stared into the