abin sat squat and
brown-walled amid this. On all sides the spruce stood dusky-green.
Beyond, over in Lone Moose meadow, Thompson, standing a moment before he
opened the door, heard voices faintly, the ringing blows of an axe. Some
one laughed.

The frost stirred him out of this momentary inaction. In a few minutes
he had a fire glowing in the stove, a lamp lighted, the chill driven
from that long deserted room. Except for that chill and a slight
closeness, the cabin was as he had left it. Outside, his two dogs
snarled and growled over their evening ration of dried fish, and when
they had consumed the last scrap curled hardily in the snow bank near
the cabin wall.

Thompson had achieved a hair-cut at Pachugan. Now he got out his razor
and painstakingly scraped away the accumulated beard. He had allowed it
to grow upon Joe Lamont's assertion that "de wheesker, she's help keep
hout de fros', Bagosh." Thompson doubted the efficiency of whiskers as a
protection, and he wanted to appear like himself. He made that
concession consciously to his vanity.

He did not waste much time. While he shaved and washed, his supper
cooked. He ate, drew the parka over his head, hooked his toes into the
loops of his snowshoes and strode off toward Carr's house. The timidity
that made him avoid the place after his fight with Tommy Ashe and
subsequent encounter with Sophie had vanished. The very eagerness of his
heart bred a profound self-confidence. He crossed the meadow as
hurriedly as an accepted lover.

For a few seconds there was no answer to his knock. Then a faint
foot-shuffle sounded, and Carr's Indian woman opened the door. She
blinked a moment in the dazzle of lamp glare on the snow until,
recognizing him, her brown face lit up with a smile.

"You come back Lone Moose, eh?" she said. "Come in."

Thompson put back the hood of his parka and laid off his mitts. The room
was hot by comparison with outdoors. He looked about. Carr's woman
motioned him to a chair. Opposite him the youngest Carr squatted like a
brown Billiken on a wolfskin. Every detail of that room was familiar.
There was the heavy, homemade chair wherein Sam Carr was wont to sit and
read. Close by it stood Sophie's favorite seat. A nickel-plated oil lamp
gave forth a mellow light under a pale birch-bark shade. But he missed
the old man with a pipe in his mouth and a book on his knee, the
gray-eyed girl with the slow smile and the sunny hair.

"Mr. Carr and Sophie-