Van Brunt found himself staring
into Thom's warm eyes. Five years, he mused, and she can't be more
than twenty now. A most remarkable creature. Being Eskimo, she should
have a little flat excuse for a nose, and lo, it is neither broad nor
flat, but aquiline, with nostrils delicately and sensitively formed
as any fine lady's of a whiter breed--the Indian strain somewhere, be
assured, Avery Van Brunt. And, Avery Van Brunt, don't be nervous, she
won't eat you; she's only a woman, and not a bad-looking one at that.
Oriental rather than aborigine. Eyes large and fairly wide apart, with
just the faintest hint of Mongol obliquity. Thom, you're an anomaly.
You're out of place here among these Eskimos, even if your father is
one. Where did your mother come from? or your grandmother? And Thom,
my dear, you're a beauty, a frigid, frozen little beauty with Alaskan
lava in your blood, and please don't look at me that way.

He laughed and stood up. Her insistent stare disconcerted him. A dog
was prowling among the grub-sacks. He would drive it away and place
them into safety against Fairfax's return. But Thom stretched out a
detaining hand and stood up, facing him.

"You?" she said, in the Arctic tongue which differs little from
Greenland to Point Barrow. "You?"

And the swift expression of her face demanded all for which "you"
stood, his reason for existence, his presence there, his relation to
her husband--everything.

"Brother," he answered in the same tongue, with a sweeping gesture to
the south. "Brothers we be, your man and I."

She shook her head. "It is not good that you be here."

"After one sleep I go."

"And my man?" she demanded, with tremulous eagerness.

Van Brunt shrugged his shoulders. He was aware of a certain secret
shame, of an impersonal sort of shame, and an anger against Fairfax.
And he felt the warm blood in his face as he regarded the young
savage. She was just a woman. That was all--a woman. The whole sordid
story over again, over and over again, as old as Eve and young as the
last new love-light.

"My man! My man! My man!" she was reiterating vehemently, her face
passionately dark, and the ruthless tenderness of the Eternal Woman,
the Mate-Woman, looking out at him from her eyes.

"Thom," he said gravely, in English, "you were born in the Northland
forest, and you have eaten fish and meat, and fought with frost and
famine, and lived simply all the days of your life. And there are many
things, in