n, on his hands and knees, hung over the still figure and gazed
down into the marble face. The short silky black hair made a little blot
of darkness in the snow, the white face was turned upward to the
starlight. Talbot, looking down, caught for an instant the sight of its
pure oval, its regular lines, and the sweet mouth, and the passionate,
reasonless face of the man crouching over it, and then looked
desperately up and down the narrow lonely trail. They were five miles
from the town, a little over three from the cabins. Glistening whiteness
lay all around, till the plains of snow grew grey in the distance;
overhead, the burning, flashing, restless stars; and far off, where the
two planets guarded the horizon, the red lights of the north began to
quiver and flicker in the night.

The man on the ground noticed them, and straightening himself suddenly,
looked towards them.

"The flare of hell!" he muttered, with staring, straining eyes; "it's
coming very near."

Talbot saw that his reason had gone, failed suddenly, as a light goes
down under a blast; he was delirious with that sudden delirium born of
the awful cold that seizes men like a wolf in the long night of the
Arctic winters.

For a second the helplessness of his situation flashed in upon Talbot's
brain--alone here at midnight on the frozen trail, with a madman and a
corpse!

He saw he must get help at once, and the cabins were the nearest point
where help could be found. He could get men who would carry Stephen by
force if necessary, but would he ever live in the fangs of this pitiless
cold till they could return to him? He stood for one moment irresolute,
unwilling to leave him to meet his death, and that horrible fear that he
read in those haggard eyes watching the horizon, alone; and in that
moment Stephen looked up at him and met his eye, and the madness rolled
back and stood off his brain for an instant. He beckoned to Talbot, and
Talbot went down on his knees beside him on the snow.

"My claims," muttered Stephen; "those claims will be yours now, do you
understand? I've arranged it all with that lawyer Hoskins, down town.
They were to be hers if anything happened to me, but we shall both go
to-night, and they will be yours. She said I had sunk my soul in them,
Talbot; she was right. The gold got me, I neglected her; I let her slip
back into evil; I've murdered her for the claims. They are the price
hell paid me. But you keep them. All turns to good