s of her kind, but because of
the difference between the fortieth and the sixtieth degrees--the
difference in the viewpoint of men who fought themselves into moral
shreds in the big game of life and those who lived a thousand miles
nearer to the dome of the earth. At the end of this first year came the
wonderful event in the history of the Company's post, which had the
Barren Lands at its back door. One day a new life was born into the
little cabin of Cummins and his wife.

After this the silent, wordless worship of Jan and his people was
filled with something very near to pathos. Cummins' wife was a mother.
She was one of them now, a part of their indissoluble existence--a part
of it as truly as the strange lights forever hovering over the Pole, as
surely as the countless stars that never left the night skies, as
surely as the endless forests and the deep snows! There was an added
value to Cummins now. If there was a long and dangerous mission to
perform it was somehow arranged so that he was left behind. Only Jan
and one or two others knew why his traps made the best catch of fur,
for more than once he had slipped a mink of an ermine or a fox into one
of Cummins' traps, knowing that it would mean a luxury or two for the
woman and the baby. And when Cummins left the post, sometimes for a day
and sometimes longer, the mother and her child fell as a brief heritage
to those who remained. The keenest eyes would not have discovered that
this was so.

In the second year, with the beginning of trapping, fell the second and
third great events. Cummins disappeared. Then came the Englishman. For
a time the first of these two overshadowed everything else at the post.
Cummins had gone to prospect a new trap-line, and was to sleep out the
first night. The second night he was still gone. On the third day came
the "Beeg Snow." It began at dawn, thickened as the day went, and
continued to thicken until it became that soft, silent deluge of white
in which no man dared venture a thousand yards from his door. The
Aurora was hidden. There were no stars in the sky at night. Day was
weighted with a strange, noiseless gloom. In all that wilderness there
was not a creature that moved. Sixty hours later, when visible life was
resumed again, the caribou, the wolf and the fox dug themselves up out
of six feet of snow, and found the world changed.

It was at the beginning of the "Beeg Snow" that Jan went to the woman's
cabin. He tapped upon he