nd rendered first
judgment unsafe. His slim fingers closed like steel about Philip's.

"Now you're coming down to business, Phil," he exclaimed. "I've been
waiting with the patience of Job--or of little Bobby Tuckett, if you
remember him, who began courting Minnie Sheldon seven years ago--and
married her the day after I got your letter. I was too busy figuring
out what you hadn't written to go to the wedding. I tried to read
between the lines, and fell down completely. I've been thinking all the
way up from Le Pas, and I'm still at sea. You called. I came. What's
up?"

"It's going to sound a little mad--at first, Greggy," chuckled
Whittemore, lighting his pipe. "It's going to give your esthetic tastes
a jar. Look here!"

He seized Gregson by the arm and led him to the door.

The cold northern sky was brilliant with stars. The cabin, its logs
half smothered in dying masses of verdure which had climbed about it
during the summer, was built on the summit of one of the wind-cropped
ridges which are called mountains in the far north. Into that north
swept infinite wilderness, white and gray where the starlit tops of the
spruce rose up at their feet, black in the distance. From somewhere out
of it there came the low, weeping monotone of surf beating on a shore.
Philip, with one hand on Gregson's shoulder, pointed with the other
into the lonely desolation which they were facing.

"There isn't much between us and the Arctic Ocean, Greggy," he said.
"See that light off there, like a great fire that has half a mind to
die out one minute and flares up the next? Doesn't it remind you of the
night we got away from Carabobo, when Donna Isobel pointed out our way
to us, with the moon coming up over the mountains as a guide? That
isn't the moon. It's the aurora borealis. You can hear the wash of the
Bay down there, and if you're keen you can catch the smell of icebergs.
There's Fort Churchill--a rifle-shot beyond the ridge, asleep. There's
nothing but Hudson's Bay Company's posts, Indian camps, and trappers
between here and civilization, which is four hundred miles down there.
Seems like a quiet and peaceful country, doesn't it? There's something
about it that makes you thrill and wonder if this isn't the biggest
part of the universe after all. Listen! Hear the Indian dogs wailing
down at Churchill! That's the primal voice in this world, the voice of
the wild. Even that beating of the surf is filled with the same thing,
for it's