twenty hours of day. It was evening
time in the wonderland of the north, a wonderland hard and frozen and
ridden by pain and death in winter, but a paradise upon earth in this
month of June.

The beauty of it filled Carrigan's soul, even as he lay on his back in
the damp sand. Far south of him steam and steel were coming, and the
world would soon know that it was easy to grow wheat at the Arctic
Circle, that cucumbers grew to half the size of a man's arm, that
flowers smothered the land and berries turned it scarlet and black. He
had dreaded these days--days of what he called "the great
discovery"--the time when a crowded civilization would at last
understand how the fruits of the earth leaped up to the call of twenty
hours of sun each day, even though that earth itself was eternally
frozen if one went down under its surface four feet with a pick and
shovel.

Tonight the gloom came earlier because of the clouds in the west. It
was very still. Even the breeze had ceased to come from up the river.
And as Carrigan listened, exulting in the thought that the coolness of
the wet sand was drawing the fever from him, he heard another sound. At
first he thought it was the splashing of a fish. But after that it came
again, and still again, and he knew that it was the steady and rhythmic
dip of paddles.

A thrill shot through him, and he raised himself to his elbow. Dusk
covered the river, and he could not see. But he heard low voices as the
paddles dipped. And after a little he knew that one of these was the
voice of a woman.

His heart gave a big jump. "She is coming back," he whispered to
himself. "She is coming back!"

IV

Carrigan's first impulse, sudden as the thrill that leaped through him,
was to cry out to the occupants of the unseen canoe. Words were on his
lips, but he forced them back. They could not miss him, could not get
beyond the reach of his voice--and he waited. After all, there might be
profit in a reasonable degree of caution. He crept back toward his
rifle, sensing the fact that movement no longer gave him very great
distress. At the same time he lost no sound from the river. The voices
were silent, and the dip, dip, dip of paddles was approaching softly
and with extreme caution. At last he could barely hear the trickle of
them, yet he knew the canoe was coming steadily nearer. There was a
suspicious secretiveness in its approach. Perhaps the lady with the
beautiful eyes and the glistening ha