d civilisation. Sea and sun and civilisation
became terms interchangeable with life, his life, and they were loaded
there on the sled for which he waited. The idea became an obsession, and
he grew to think of himself as the rightful and deprived owner of the
sled-load of life.

His flour was running short, and he went back to two biscuits in the
morning and two biscuits at night. Because, of this his weakness
increased and the cold bit in more savagely, and day by day he watched
by the dead trail that would not live for him. At last the scurvy
entered upon its next stage. The skin was unable longer to cast off the
impurity of the blood, and the result was that the body began to swell.
His ankles grew puffy, and the ache in them kept him awake long hours at
night. Next, the swelling jumped to his knees, and the sum of his pain
was more than doubled.

Then there came a cold snap. The temperature went down and down--forty,
fifty, sixty degrees below zero. He had no thermometer, but this he knew
by the signs and natural phenomena understood by all men in that
country--the crackling of water thrown on the snow, the swift sharpness
of the bite of the frost, and the rapidity with which his breath froze
and coated the canvas walls and roof of the tent. Vainly he fought the
cold and strove to maintain his watch on the bank. In his weak condition
he was an easy prey, and the frost sank its teeth deep into him before
he fled away to the tent and crouched by the fire. His nose and cheeks
were frozen and turned black, and his left thumb had frozen inside the
mitten. He concluded that he would escape with the loss of the first
joint.

Then it was, beaten into the tent by the frost, that the trail, with
monstrous irony, suddenly teemed with life. Three sleds went by the
first day, and two the second. Once, during each day, he fought his way
out to the bank only to succumb and retreat, and each of the two times,
within half-an-hour after he retreated, a sled went by.

The cold snap broke, and he was able to remain by the bank once more,
and the trail died again. For a week he crouched and watched, and never
life stirred along it, not a soul passed in or out. He had cut down to
one biscuit night and morning, and somehow he did not seem to notice it.
Sometimes he marvelled at the way life remained in him. He never would
have thought it possible to endure so much.

When the trail fluttered anew with life it was life with which he cou