over him now with a tenderness that
made him lift his cramped arms with tears, as a sick child might to its
mother. The haloed sun with his attendant dogs--how little the wonder
had touched him! Never had he seen them so dim and sad as to-night ...
saying good-bye to one who loved the sun.

The great frozen road out of sight below, road that came winding,
winding down out of the Arctic Circle--what other highway so majestic,
mysterious?--shining and beckoning on. An earthly Milky Way, leading to
the golden paradise he had been travelling towards since summer.

And he was to go no further?--not till the June rains and thaws and
winds and floods should carry him back, as he had foreseen, far below
there at Holy Cross.

With a sharp contraction of the heart he shut his eyes again. When he
opened them they rested on the alder-twig, a couple of yards above,
holding out mocking finger-tips, and he turned his head in the snow
till again he could see the mock-suns looking down.

"As well try to reach the sky as reach the alder-bush. What did that
mean? That he was really going to lie there till he died? _He_ die, and
the Colonel and everybody else go on living?"

He half rose on his elbow at the monstrous absurdity of the idea. "I
won't die!" he said out loud.

Crack, crack! warned the ice-crust between him and that long fall to
the river. With horror at his heart he shrank away and hugged the face
of the precipice. Presently he put out his hand and broke the ice-crust
above. With mittened fists and palms he pounded firm a little ledge of
snow. Reaching out further, he broke the crust obliquely just above,
and having packed the snow as well as he could immediately about, and
moving lengthwise with an infinite caution, he crawled up the few
inches to the narrow ledge, balancing his stiff body with a nicety
possible only to acrobat or sleep-walker.

It was in no normal state of ordinary waking senses that the work went
on--with never a downward look, nor even up, eyes riveted to the patch
of snow on which the mittened hands fell as steady and untrembling as
steel hammers. In the seconds of actual consciousness of his situation
that twice visited him, he crouched on the ledge with closed eyes, in
the clutch of an overmastering horror, absolutely still, like a bird in
the talons of a hawk. Each time when he opened his eyes he would stare
at the snow-ledge till hypnotised into disregard of danger, balance his
slight body, li