le a minute."

"Oh, cheese it, Williams!" the men cried. "Let the other man play."

"What do _you_ want to do with the fiddle--think it's a music box?"
asked Sam, its owner.

"Go to hell!" said Williams. As Field gave the violin over to him his
hands seemed to tremble with eagerness.

He raised his bow and struck into an imposing brilliant strain, and the
men fell back in astonishment.

"Well, I'll be damned!" gasped the owner of the violin.

"Keep quiet, Sam."

Mrs. Field looked at her husband. "Why, Ed, he is playing Sarasate!"

"That's what he is," he returned slangily, too much astonished to do
more than gaze. Williams played on.

There was a faint defect in the high notes, as if his fingers did not
touch the strings properly, but his bow action showed cultivation and
breadth of feeling. As he struck into one of those difficult
octave-leaping movements his face became savage. On the E string a
squeal broke forth; he flung the violin into Sam's lap with a ferocious
curse, and then extending his hands, hard, crooked to fit the axe-helve,
calloused and chapped, he said to Field:

"Look at my cursed hands. Lovely things to play with, ain't they?"

His voice trembled with passion. He turned and went outside. As he
passed Mrs. Field his head was bowed and he was uttering a groaning cry
like one suffering acute physical agony.

She went out quickly, and Field and Ridgeley followed. They were all
moved--but the men made little of it, seeing how deeply touched she
was.

"That's what drink does for a man," Ridgeley said, as they watched
Williams disappear down the swampers' trail.

"That man has been a violinist," said Field. "What's he doing up here?"

"Came up to get away from himself," Ridgeley replied.

"I'm afraid he's failed," said Field, as he put his arm about his wife
and led her to the sleigh.

The ride home was made mainly in silence. "Oh, the splendid silence!"
the woman kept saying in her heart. "Oh, the splendid moonlight, the
marvelous radiance!" Everywhere a heavenly serenity--not a footstep, not
a bell, not a cry, not a cracking tree--nothing but vivid light, white
snow dappled and lined with shadows, and trees etched against a starlit
sky. Splendor of light and sheen and shadow. Wide wastes of snow so
white the stumps stood like columns of charcoal. A night of Nature's
making when she is tired of noise and blare of color.

And in the midst of it stood the camps and the reek of obscenity