they
shuddered. With the former he had covered his eyes from the ravens, but
his cheeks and head were bloody and shredded. He muttered constantly,
like the thick whirring of machinery run down.

"Oh, my God!" Buck whispered.

Crowley had mastered himself and knelt beside the figure. He looked up
and tears lay on his cheeks.

"Look at them hands and feet! That was done by fire and frost together.
He must have fell in his own camp-fires after he went crazy."

The garments were burned off to elbow and knee, while the flesh was
black and raw.

Tenderly they carried the gabbing creature down to the timber and laid
him on a bed of boughs. His condition told the grim tale of his
wanderings, crazed with hunger and hardship.

Heating water, they poured it into him, dressing his wounds with strips
from their underclothes. Of stimulants they had none, but fed him the
last pinch of flour, together with the final rasher of salt pork,
although they knew that these things are not good for starving men. For
many days they had traveled on less than quarter rations themselves.

"What will we do?"

"It ain't over twenty miles to the niggers'. He'll die before we can get
help back. D'ye reckon we can carry him?"

It was not sympathy which prompted Crowley, for he sympathized with his
boyish companion, whose sufferings it hurt him sorely to augment. It was
not pity; he pitied himself, and his own deplorable condition; nor did
mercy enter into his processes, for the man had mercilessly planned to
kill him, and he likewise had nursed a bitter hatred against him, which
misfortune could only dim. It was not these things which moved him, but
a vaguer, wilder quality; an elemental, unspoken, indefinable feeling of
brotherhood throughout the length of the North, teaching subtly, yet
absolutely and without appeal, that no man shall be left in his
extremity to the cruel harshness of this forbidding land.

"Carry him?" Buck cried. "No! You're crazy! What's the use? He'll die,
anyhow--and so'll we if we don't get grub soon." Buck was new to the
country, and he was a boy.

"No, he won't. He lived hard and he'll die hard, for he's a hellion--he
is. We've got to pack him in!"

"By God! I won't risk _my_ life for a corpse--'specially one like him."
The lad broke out in hysterical panic, for he had lived on the raggedest
edge of his nerve these many days. Now his every muscle was dead and
numbed with pain. Only his mind was clear, caused by