froze
upon her lips and iced the knitted wool that covered her chin. "Why
don't they teach a girl to handle an ax?" she cried.

II

When at last the wolfish cold of the Labrador night had come, it found
Trafford and Marjorie seated almost warmly on a bed of pine boughs
between the sheltering dark rock behind and a big but well-husbanded
fire in front, drinking a queer-tasting but not unsavory soup of
lynx-flesh, which she had fortified with the remainder of the brandy.
Then they tried roast lynx and ate a little, and finished with some
scraps of cheese and deep draughts of hot water.

The snowstorm poured incessantly out of the darkness to become flakes of
burning fire in the light of the flames, flakes that vanished magically,
but it only reached them and wetted them in occasional gusts. What did
it matter for the moment if the dim snowheaps rose and rose about them?
A glorious fatigue, an immense self-satisfaction, possessed Marjorie;
she felt that they had both done well.

"I am not afraid of to-morrow now," she said at last.

Trafford was smoking his pipe and did not speak for a moment. "Nor I,"
he said at last. "Very likely we'll get through with it." He added after
a pause: "I thought I was done for. A man--loses heart--after a loss of
blood."

"The leg's better?"

"Hot as fire." His humor hadn't left him. "It's a treat," he said. "The
hottest thing in Labrador."

Later Marjorie slept, but on a spring as it were, lest the fire should
fall. She replenished it with boughs, tucked in the half-burnt logs, and
went to sleep again. Then it seemed to her that some invisible hand was
pouring a thin spirit on the flames that made them leap and crackle and
spread north and south until they filled the heavens with a gorgeous
glow. The snowstorm was overpast, leaving the sky clear and all the
westward heaven alight with the trailing, crackling, leaping curtains of
the [v]aurora, brighter than she had ever seen them before. Quite
clearly visible beyond the smolder of the fire, a wintry waste of rock
and snow, boulder beyond boulder, passed into a [v]dun obscurity. The
mountain to the right of them lay long and white and stiff, a shrouded
death. All earth was dead and waste, and the sky alive and coldly
marvelous, signalling and astir. She watched the changing, shifting
colors, and they made her think of the gathering banners of inhuman
hosts, the stir and marshaling of icy giants for ends stupendous and
indiffere