there were never another in all
the world, and drew in the first mouthful of smoke. This he retained
meditatively for a time, and blew out through his pursed lips slowly
and caressingly. Then his face seemed to soften as he leaned back,
and a soft blur to film his eyes. He sighed heavily, happily, with
immeasurable content, and then said suddenly:

"God! But that tastes good!"

Van Brunt nodded sympathetically. "Five years, you say?"

"Five years." The man sighed again. "And you, I presume, wish to know
about it, being naturally curious, and this a sufficiently strange
situation, and all that. But it's not much. I came in from Edmonton
after musk-ox, and like Pike and the rest of them, had my mischances,
only I lost my party and outfit. Starvation, hardship, the regular
tale, you know, sole survivor and all that, till I crawled into
Tantlatch's, here, on hand and knee."

"Five years," Van Brunt murmured retrospectively, as though turning
things over in his mind.

"Five years on February last. I crossed the Great Slave early in
May--"

"And you are ... Fairfax?" Van Brunt interjected.

The man nodded.

"Let me see ... John, I think it is, John Fairfax."

"How did you know?" Fairfax queried lazily, half-absorbed in curling
smoke-spirals upward in the quiet air.

"The papers were full of it at the time. Prevanche--"

"Prevanche!" Fairfax sat up, suddenly alert. "He was lost in the Smoke
Mountains."

"Yes, but he pulled through and came out."

Fairfax settled back again and resumed his smoke-spirals. "I am glad
to hear it," he remarked reflectively. "Prevanche was a bully fellow
if he _did_ have ideas about head-straps, the beggar. And he pulled
through? Well, I'm glad."

Five years ... the phrase drifted recurrently through Van Brunt's
thought, and somehow the face of Emily Southwaithe seemed to rise up
and take form before him. Five years ... A wedge of wild-fowl honked
low overhead and at sight of the encampment veered swiftly to the
north into the smouldering sun. Van Brunt could not follow them. He
pulled out his watch. It was an hour past midnight. The northward
clouds flushed bloodily, and rays of sombre-red shot southward, firing
the gloomy woods with a lurid radiance. The air was in breathless
calm, not a needle quivered, and the least sounds of the camp were
distinct and clear as trumpet calls. The Crees and _voyageurs_ felt
the spirit of it and mumbled in dreamy undertones, and the cook
uncons