h, as though consumption gripped his
lungs, while his eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives
in the last stage. Pentley was his name--Amos Pentley--and Bonner did
not like him, though he felt a pity for the forlorn and hopeless devil.
They did not get along together, these two men who, of all men, should
have been on good terms in the face of the cold and silence and darkness
of the long winter.

In the end, Bonner concluded that Amos was partly demented, and left him
alone, doing all the work himself except the cooking. Even then, Amos
had nothing but bitter looks and an undisguised hatred for him. This was
a great loss to Bonner; for the smiling face of one of his own kind, the
cheery word, the sympathy of comradeship shared with misfortune--these
things meant much; and the winter was yet young when he began to realize
the added reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had
found to impel his own hand against his life.

It was very lonely at Twenty Mile. The bleak vastness stretched away on
every side to the horizon. The snow, which was really frost, flung its
mantle over the land and buried everything in the silence of death. For
days it was clear and cold, the thermometer steadily recording forty to
fifty degrees below zero. Then a change came over the face of things.
What little moisture had oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull
grey, formless clouds; it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to
twenty below; and the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules
that hissed like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot. After
that it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gathered
to blanket the earth from the cold of outer space. That was all. Nothing
happened. No storms, no churning waters and threshing forests, nothing
but the machine-like precipitation of accumulated moisture. Possibly the
most notable thing that occurred through the weary weeks was the gliding
of the temperature up to the unprecedented height of fifteen below. To
atone for this, outer space smote the earth with its cold till the
mercury froze and the spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below
for a fortnight, when it burst. There was no telling how much colder it
was after that. Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity, was
the lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of light
between the darkness.

Neil Bonner was a social a