subject--it caused him discomfort; there was so much left for him in
life. He planned, when he had captured Spurling and seen him safely
hanged, to buy himself out of the Mounted Police, return to England,
and there live pleasantly at his club in London and as squire on his
estate. He would marry, he told himself; and though not the girl whom
he had most desired, for he believed her to be dead, yet, like a
sensible man, some other girl, who would be his friend, and bear his
children, and make him happy. If once he could get out of Keewatin,
having performed his duty honourably, he would do all that--when
Spurling had been captured alive or dead.

Therefore he broke in on Granger roughly, inquiring, "Where are those
huskies which you are going to lend me?"

"They are Spurling's huskies which he left behind when I lent him
mine."

"How long ago was that?--If they're Spurling's, they must be pretty
well played out."

"They are. They've rested for thirty hours more or less; but I don't
think you'll manage to catch him up with them."

"Perhaps not, but I'll try; he can't be more than three hours ahead."

"Three hours with a fresh team is as good as three days."

"You forget the difference between the two men."

"No, I don't, for the one has the memory of his crime."

"It's the memory of his crime that'll wear him out, and that same
memory that'll give me strength."

"Why? What makes you hate him so? Supposing he did kill a woman, it
may have been an accident. She may even have felt grateful for the
bullet, as I should have done just now had you shot me dead. It's
horrible to kill anyone, but then the poor devil's fleeing for his
life and he's suffering a thousand times more pain than he
inflicted."

"Is he? Does he suffer the pain of the man who follows behind?
Supposing a certain man had loved that woman and had lost her, and had
planned all his life on the off-chance of meeting her again, dreaming
of her day and night, and then had suddenly learnt that she was
brutally dead by Spurling's hand on some God-forsaken Yukon River,
where the ground was hard like iron so that no grave could be dug by
the murderer, and her body froze to marble and lay exposed all winter
through the long dark days, with the bullet wound red in her forehead,
and her grey face looking up toward the frosty sky, till the spring
came and the water washed her body under and threw it up in a creek
near Forty-Mile, where a year later it was