il, for you can't get out of
the country. And I'll give you one chance. You're almost dead. Very
well. I shall send no word to the Company until the spring. In the
meantime, the thing for you to do is to die. Now _mush_!"

"You go to bed!" Jees Uck insisted, when Amos had churned away into the
night towards Holy Cross. "You sick man yet, Neil."

"And you're a good girl, Jees Uck," he answered. "And here's my hand on
it. But you must go home."

"You don't like me," she said simply.

He smiled, helped her on with her _parka_, and led her to the door. "Only
too well, Jees Uck," he said softly; "only too well."

After that the pall of the Arctic night fell deeper and blacker on the
land. Neil Bonner discovered that he had failed to put proper valuation
upon even the sullen face of the murderous and death-stricken Amos. It
became very lonely at Twenty Mile. "For the love of God, Prentiss, send
me a man," he wrote to the agent at Fort Hamilton, three hundred miles up
river. Six weeks later the Indian messenger brought back a reply. It
was characteristic: "Hell. Both feet frozen. Need him myself--Prentiss."

To make matters worse, most of the Toyaats were in the back country on
the flanks of a caribou herd, and Jees Uck was with them. Removing to a
distance seemed to bring her closer than ever, and Neil Bonner found
himself picturing her, day by day, in camp and on trail. It is not good
to be alone. Often he went out of the quiet store, bare-headed and
frantic, and shook his fist at the blink of day that came over the
southern sky-line. And on still, cold nights he left his bed and
stumbled into the frost, where he assaulted the silence at the top of his
lungs, as though it were some tangible, sentiment thing that he might
arouse; or he shouted at the sleeping dogs till they howled and howled
again. One shaggy brute he brought into the post, playing that it was
the new man sent by Prentiss. He strove to make it sleep decently under
blankets at nights and to sit at table and eat as a man should; but the
beast, mere domesticated wolf that it was, rebelled, and sought out dark
corners and snarled and bit him in the leg, and was finally beaten and
driven forth.

Then the trick of personification seized upon Neil Bonner and mastered
him. All the forces of his environment metamorphosed into living,
breathing entities and came to live with him. He recreated the primitive
pantheon; reared an altar to th