rious waitings, strange screeching
sounds, and heart-breaking meanings in its strife, and when at last its
passion died away and there followed a strange quiet, the two men could
feel the frozen earth under their feet shiver with the rumbling
reverberations of the crashing and breaking fields of ice out in
Hudson's Bay. With it came a dull and steady roar, like the incessant
rumble of a far battle, broken now and then--when an ice mountain split
asunder--with a report like that of a sixteen-inch gun. Down through
the Roes Welcome into Hudson's Bay countless billions of tons of ice
were rending their way like Hunnish armies in the break-up.

"You'd better lie down," suggested Keith.

Conniston, instead, rose slowly to his feet and went to a table on
which a seal-oil lamp was burning. He swayed a little as he walked. He
sat down, and Keith seated himself opposite him. Between them lay a
worn deck of cards. As Conniston fumbled them in his fingers, he looked
straight across at Keith and grinned.

"It's queer, devilish queer," he said.

"Don't you think so, Keith?" He was an Englishman, and his blue eyes
shone with a grim, cold humor. "And funny," he added.

"Queer, but not funny," partly agreed Keith.

"Yes, it is funny," maintained Conniston. "Just twenty-seven months
ago, lacking three days, I was sent out to get you, Keith. I was told
to bring you in dead or alive--and at the end of the twenty-sixth month
I got you, alive. And as a sporting proposition you deserve a hundred
years of life instead of the noose, Keith, for you led me a chase that
took me through seven different kinds of hell before I landed you. I
froze, and I starved, and I drowned. I haven't seen a white woman's
face in eighteen months. It was terrible. But I beat you at last.
That's the jolly good part of it, Keith--I beat you and GOT you, and
there's the proof of it on your wrists this minute. I won. Do you
concede that? You must be fair, old top, because this is the last big
game I'll ever play." There was a break, a yearning that was almost
plaintive, in his voice.

Keith nodded. "You won," he said.

"You won so square that when the frost got your lung--"

"You didn't take advantage of me," interrupted Conniston. "That's the
funny part of it, Keith. That's where the humor comes in. I had you all
tied up and scheduled for the hangman when--bing!--along comes a cold
snap that bites a corner of my lung, and the tables are turned. And
instead