again, and his
moccasined feet fell in heavy, thumping tread to the door.

That was the first time he had spoken that evening, and not even the
half Cree, or Williams, or the factor's son guessed how the blood was
racing through his veins. Outside he stood with the pale, cold glow of
the Aurora Borealis shining upon him, and the limitless wilderness,
heavy in its burden of snow, reaching out into the ghost-gray fabric of
the night. The Englishman's laugh followed him, boisterous and grossly
thick, and Jan moved on,--wondering how much longer the half Cree and
Williams and the factor's son would listen to the things that this man
was saying of the most beautiful thing that had ever come into their
lives.

"It ees truth, I swear, by dam'--thees honor of what he calls the 'Beeg
Snows!'" persisted Jan to himself, and he set his back to the factor's
office and trudged through the snow.

When he came to the black ledge of the spruce and balsam forest he
stopped and looked back. It was an hour past bedtime at the post. The
Company's store loomed up silent and lightless. The few log cabins
betrayed no signs of life. Only in the factor's office, which was the
Company's haven for the men of the wilderness, was there a waste of
kerosene, and that was because of the Englishman whom Jan was beginning
to hate. He stared back at the one glowing window with a queer
thickening in his throat and a clenching of the hands in the pockets of
his caribou-skin coat. Then he looked long and wistfully at a little
cabin which stood apart from the rest, and to himself he whispered
again what he had said to the Englishman. Until to-night--or, perhaps,
until two weeks ago--Jan had been satisfied with his world. It was a
big, passionless world, mostly of snow and ice and endless privation,
but he loved it, and there was only a fast-fading memory of another
world in his brain. It was a world of big, honest hearts kept warm
within caribou skins, of moccasined men whom endless solitude had
taught to say little and do much--a world of "Big Snows," as the
Englishman had said, in which Jan and all his people had come very
close to the things which God created. Without the steely gray flash of
those mystery-lights over the Arctic pole Jan would have been homesick;
his soul would have withered and died in anything but this wondrous
land which he knew, with its billion dazzling stars by night and its
eye-blinding brilliancy by day. For Jan, in a way, was