r in some great race, who had fallen at
the last lap, and, waiting to recover himself before making the final
dash toward the tape, watched anxiously lest his next rival should
round the bend, and surprise him before he was up on his feet again,
he could not have been more tensely excited. His breath came in gasps
and spasms; his body jerked and trembled even while he sat. He began
to do things, and did not finish them. He opened his mouth to speak,
and was silent. He half rose to his feet, and fell back again. He
turned his head to look at Granger, then thought better of it, and
continued staring into the west. Granger watched him, and wondered
what might be the secret which he was hesitating to impart. Was his
mind a blank through weariness? Was he arguing out some dreadful
problem within himself? Or was he only mad?

What frail and isolated creatures we are!--when once our power of
communicating thought is gone, though we breathe and move above the
earth, we are more distant one from another than if we were truly
dead; for, when a soul has totally forsaken its body, and the body has
ceased to express, we, who live, can at least imagine that the thing
departed sometimes returns and hovers within ourselves. To live and be
silent is a remoter banishment from Life than the irrevocable exile
decreed by Death.

Granger could now see that the change which he had noted in Spurling
might quite well have been the work of a month or two months, and was
due to trouble and neglect. The man was unwashed and unfed, and for
many nights he had not slept. His eyes were ringed and bloodshot with
fatigue, and with incipient snow-blindness. His cheeks were sunken and
cadaverous with too much travel; his body was limp with over-work.
Should the cause of his excitement be suddenly removed, he would
collapse; it was nervous courage which upheld him. And there, despite
all these alterations for the worse, he could still discern the old
Spurling--the man whom he had loved. The brows retained their old
frown of impudent defiance, and the mouth its good-humoured, reckless
contempt. These had been overlaid by some baser passion, it was true;
but they remained, showed through, and seemed recoverable. As he
looked, the memory flashed through his mind of Spurling at his
proudest--on that night at the Mascot dance-hall, when they had
carried into Dawson City the news of the great bonanza they had struck
at Drunkman's Shallows. He was standing on a